


The Machinations of Perception

by HapaxLegomenon



Series: Machinations [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Captivity, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-10-18 20:02:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 55,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10624146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapaxLegomenon/pseuds/HapaxLegomenon
Summary: Matt Holt has been a Galra captive for... he doesn't remember how long.  He's starting to lose hope of ever escaping, and is well past the starting point of losing his sanity.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly written during NaNoWriMo 2016, and as such is not wholly compliant with S2 canon. Differences should be minor at best, though.
> 
> Please mind the tags, and if you need or want specifications on any potential triggers, please feel free to comment here, or send a message to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/@paxlegomenon).

There are three hundred and fifty-seven cracks in the glowing purple of the floor.  Seven hundred and ninety-one in the walls.  Four hundred and two or so are shorter than the length of his hand.  Eighty-three are smaller than his thumb.  There’s no visible door, no seams in the walls, just a solid pane of concrete or something like it.  In one of the walls, there’s a hidden panel or warp, through which some kind of sustenance -- he would hesitate to give it the respect of even thinking of it as _food_ \-- is passed at irregular intervals.  He’s examined the walls at length, because it’s not like he has anything else to do, but he can’t find any trace of an entrance.  Apart from the manacle-lock panel on what he thinks of the back wall, away from the food portal, the cell is entirely devoid of tech. Or of anything else, really.  Temperature perfectly balanced to match his, perfect silence.  Perfectly bland, aside from strobing purple lights.

Matt thinks that he could have imagined, probably, maybe, sort of, how terrifying it would be to be captured by aliens.  He’s quite an aficionado of old horror sci-fi movies, if he does say so himself.  Or, was.  Back on Earth.  Enslavement and torture are a little different experienced firsthand, shockingly -- no pun intended -- but what he didn’t expect was the absolute, mind-numbing _boredom_ of imprisonment.

If the Galra don’t kill him first, the boredom certainly will.

He’s been in the cell for… he doesn’t know, actually.  Has no idea how long he’s been here.  Being separated from his father, and escaping… and then being caught again… that could have been days ago, or months.  He’d tried scratching a tally into the wall, at first -- three faint parallel marks under Crack #650 -- but with no real environmental changes whatsoever to track, well.  That idea died pretty damn quickly.

“I’m cold!” he yells at the air, to no response, even though he’s forgotten what cold feels like.  

“I’m hungry!”  He doesn’t remember what it feels like to be satiated, or what it feels like to be hungry.  He doesn’t remember.

“Galra drones are poopheads!”

“Zarkon looks like a fluffy little fruitbat!”

He shrieks at the electric shock that shatters up his arms and down his fingertips, and his stomach flips at the dissonance -- it burns, and it hurts, but the sizzling of his skin under the manacles _smells good_.  Like grilling sausage.  Pork chops.  He throws his head back and laughs hysterically.

There are probably cracks in the ceiling, too, infinitesimally small and crooked but there nonetheless.  He can’t see that far, anymore, not without the glasses that are probably shattered somewhere across the ice fields of Kerberos.  His entire world is limited to what he can see with any clarity a foot from his nose and a small, blurry radius beyond.  Lucky, really, that he’s stuck in this hellhole of a cell; at least he can see all of it.  Except the ceiling.  He squints and tries not to pass out from the pain in his wrists and he sings an old pop song as loudly and as off-key as he possibly can.

“That one was called Party Rock Anthem,” he tells the air.  “From waaaaay back in the beginning of the twenty-first century.  And next on our playlist --” he chokes off suddenly, head spinning.

For the last -- however long he’s been here, there’ve been no sounds that he didn’t make himself.  No drone footsteps, no Galran conversations to eavesdrop on, no engine hums.  Even the food-flap doesn’t make a sound when his rations of purple goo appear.  They just -- poof.  Which is why he’s taken to filling the silence himself, so that he doesn’t go insane.  More insane.

There’s a sound.  A sort of scuffling, dragging sound.  Matt scrambles on elbows and knees for the wall where the portal appears and shoves eagerly against it, cheek pressed into the wall and ears straining.  “What’s going on out there?” he yells, entirely unable to stop himself.  “You kids get off my lawn or --”

The manacles activate, launching him bodily across the cell.  His wrists snap together against the panel and his head cracks against the wall and be doesn’t even bother trying to stifle a cry of pain at the way his body’s twisted, one arm crossing his body and the other bent sharply back at the wrist.  Something drips onto his cheek and he shakes his head woozily, feeling it pulsing with his rapidfire heartbeat.

The wall opens.

_The door opens._

The door has never opened.

Matt blinks and shakes his head again, trying to focus his blurry eyes.  He sees purple, a lot of purple, and the glowing eyes of the drones surrounding the softer form of what must be an actual Galran officer.  

“Fix this one, _doctor_ ,” the Galra growls, the sneer clear in his voice even through the translation hum.

“Not that kind of a doctor,” Matt retorts reflexively, then cringes against the wall when something’s thrown into the room with a heavy thump.  The door closes -- opposite the manacle panel, haha, he knew it --  and the silence is complete again except for Matt’s heartbeat in his ears and his panting, panicked breathing.  His heavy gasps echo staccato.

Except… Matt has been here for a long time.  That’s not what his breath sounds like.  And he’d know.  He once counted fifteen thousand, eight hundred and eight breaths before an abrupt panic attack had made him lose his place.  That’s his record, though he’d come close, the other day (week? hour?), at just under fourteen thousand.  Point is -- he’s had a lot of time to listen to nothing but his own breathing.  And this isn’t what it sounds like.  

The manacles disengage without warning and his hands hit the ground with a muffled smack.  He stays huddled against the wall, trying to process this new sensory input -- and isn’t _that_ the most frustrating thing in the world, because he remembers being a genius and not really having to think about anything, ever, or at least nothing less complex than astrophysics or microbiotic enzyme pathways or baking brownies.  He’s been doing trigonometry since he was three.  Now he’s stuck behind a mental wall of hysteria and he can’t figure out what --

And then it resolves, and he’s gasping, and he’s shaking, he can tell he’s shaking because the manacles rattle around his charred wrists, but that barely registers, because that, that…

That’s a human.

Matt scrambles forward, hands reaching before he makes the conscious decision.  It’s a person, a boy, and he’s as naked as Matt is but his skin is dark and stretched over strong, wiry muscles, and while he’s mottled with bruises there’s a lack of scar tissue that strikes Matt as significant, somehow, but he can’t quite put his finger on why.  He’s unconscious, and bleeding sluggishly from his mouth, but his breath booms like a drumbeat.

Matt never really expected to see another human again.  Not with his father off in another cell in the middle of hell somewhere, and Shiro --

He clamps aggressively down on thoughts of Shiro and his father.  Not the time.  “Not right now.  Not the time,” he mutters out loud to himself, and repeats it again.  He digs down in his memory bank and pulls up his first aid classes.  Unconscious.  Head injury.  Recovery position?  Okay.  The boy is easy to manipulate, limbs flopping when Matt turns him over and then maneuvers him onto his side.  His fingers linger, careful over the boy’s bruised shoulders and touching his soft hair, it’s so soft, and without thinking about it he brushes the bangs back.

The memory hits him like a freight train and he gasps with the force of it, almost buckling at the phantom feeling of gentle fingers on his forehead, curving down his cheekbone, and a hug and a kiss on the cheek and a proud voice saying, “You’d better leave something for me to discover, I can’t believe _you_ get to go to space and I’m stuck on Earth.”

Someone groans and Matt snaps back.  He feels muscles twitching under his fingertips, and the boy moans again.

“Uh,” Matt says, and then he laughs, because he’s been talking to himself for a long time, here, and even before the cell he remembers being told in increasingly exasperated tones to “please, for the love of God, shut up, Matt!” or “Be silent, do not provoke the Galra,” and now that it matters, all he can think to say is, “uh.”

“Hey,” he says, when the bubble of giggles pops and disappears.  “Heeey.  Are you okay?”  Not okay.  Stupid question.  The boy shifts again and Matt wonders if he should move his hand, but he leaves it where it is.

His eyes are blue.  They blink, and the pupils constrict.  Uneven.  Concussion.  “Pidge?” he mumbles, looking blearily up at Matt.

“What?”

He frowns, and blinks again, eyelids squeezing tight and fluttering open.  “You’re not Pidge.”

Matt pulls back a bit, sits on his heels, and a hundred thousand words run through his head -- mostly questions.  He trips over them for a few moments, floundering as he looks into the eyes of the first human being he’s seen in far too long, and that makes him not-think of Shiro all over again, and he feels like he’s falling.  “I…” he licks his lips and flexes the muscles in his thigh that make his toes jump.  “I’m… no?  Probably?  I’m Matt.  Who are you?”

The boy blinks owlishly up at him, face scrunched up like he’s trying to solve a difficult math problem.  “‘M Lance,” he says finally, voice soft, and vulnerable, and Matt tenses reflexively.  

“Don’t tell the Galra,” Lance says, pleading.  Matt is certain that whatever he doesn’t want the Galra to know, they already do ( _Zarkon sees everything_ ), but he nods solemnly and promises to keep the secret.

Lance starts to sit up, wincing, and Matt hurries to support his head, with a twitch and a mumbled apology when the manacle on his wrist bumps Lance’s jaw and sends a singing pain to his knuckles.  

“Lance,” Matt says to get his attention once Lance has spat a bloody tooth into his palm and sits staring in confusion around the tiny room.  Matt puts his hands on Lance’s shoulders, leans forward, and looks him in the face, tone as serious as he can manage.  “Lance, I need you to do something for me.”

Lance meets his gaze head-on and his expression shifts to something hard and focused.  The face of a soldier, Matt realizes somewhere in the back of his mind, something that Shiro had but neither himself nor his father had even quite managed to replicate.    
  
Matt raises one hand, and points upwards with his finger, ignoring the twinge in his wrist.  He takes a deep, steadying breath.  “How many cracks are in the ceiling?”


	2. Chapter 2

Matt used to pull all-nighters with some regularity, back at the Garrison. Whether it was working on last-minute assignments or sneaking off-campus with a handheld electron microscope pilfered from the astrobiology lab or binging on old two-dimensional horror movies and artificially enhanced No-Fat Lo-Sodium Genetichips (Spicy HellPepper flavour, obviously), he isn’t a stranger to being awake for longer than any reasonable person could recommend. Hey, he’s a scientist -- ill-advised sleep-deprivation to engage in bouts of obsession are practically a requirement. This is starting to feel like the thirty hour mark, he thinks woozily, after being once again startled out of an almost-sleep by a strobing flash of purple light. He can feel every heartbeat inside his head, and he braces his hands on the floor for support against the spinning.

This is a problem, he knows that, but he can’t quite wrap his head around how to fix it. If he tries to focus, he thinks he remembers waking up in this cell, before, so he must have slept at some point. The flashing lights are distracting, though, and so is the groaning of the… of the…

“Lance?” Matt mutters, blinking against the light and trying to turn his head to look without falling over. The sound is localized to somewhere near his knee, and with no little degree of luck his hand finds its way to rest on the top of Lance’s head, where he’s immediately sidetracked by how soft and short his hair is. Matt wonders randomly how long it’s been since he last cut his own hair. It’s wrapped up in a greasy tangle against his shoulder blades and it feels like something crawling on him, like a rat or one of those green things with the eight legs that lived in the mines, and he feels the tiny pincers grabbing into his skin and scratching and he gasps and slams his back against the wall. His head spins and his ears ring and there’s something soft under his hand.

Oh.

“Lance,” Matt says again, trying to pull his shattered pieces back together. “Hey. Heeey. You know what this is?”

He waits, but if there’s a response he can’t quite hear it over the resonating hum bouncing between his ears. “Sleep deprivation torture. This’s some fucked up shit here, man, pretty sure they outlawed this back in… um… back in… well, a while ago. On Earth, anyway. I wonder if there’s any kind of, of common galactic law? Cause, like, even back home, space was, uh, was under maritime law, at l-least when we went up to Kerberos, right?” He laughs, half-hysterical. “Pioneers. They called us pioneers. Boldly going where no man has gone before. Maritime law. Me’n’Shiro called us space pirates.”

Something shifts against Matt’s leg and he jumps, a little, skin twitching. Lance pushes himself up with a groan, cradling his head in one hand, and Matt’s train of thought completely derails and Lance weakly turns his head and gags, spitting up a trickle of bile and swallowing convulsively. Right. Nausea. Concussion. There’s something about concussions and not-sleeping, he can’t remember it, exactly, but he’s sure that’s not why the Galra are doing this. “Our benevolent alien overlords,” he mutters. “No comas.”

“You’re crazy,” Lance grumbles, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and flopping back to glare at Matt with one baleful eye. It’s watery-looking and shot through with red and his eyelids are puffy and swollen, and Matt nods and licks his lips and agrees.

“Yeah. Yeah, I definitely am,” he giggles again, bumps his shoulder against Lance’s, and leans in towards him. He sees Lance’s automatic reaction to lean forward, too, to accept whatever this confidence is going to be, and some instinct makes him throw an arm around the boy’s shoulders, just to hold him close. Lance has blue eyes. Red around white around blue around black. Matt hasn’t see anything blue in what feels like a long time.

“Alone in space,” he whispers, staring at the blue eyes. “It’ll do that to ya.” He winks and clicks his tongue.

One of those green octopede things is crawling across Lance’s arm and when Matt goes to brush it off, there’s nothing there. His hand stills, and after a moment of frantic scrambling through his own mind he digs the long, cracked end of his middle-finger nail into his palm. There’s a small crescent-shaped scab there. It’s never healed. To his vague surprise, along with the octopede, the spider web hanging in front of the door disappears, too, as does the pair of fuzzy socks he thought he was wearing. He flexes his toes experimentally and the nails catch on one of the cracks in the floor. No socks.

“Hallucinations are fun,” he says, mostly to himself.

“You’re hallucinating?” Lance says, his voice high and concerned. His skin is warm under Matt’s arm. And soft. No scars. Again, the observation pings on something important, something niggling and just out of reach. Just like so many things, these days. He hates it.

Mat weaves his head back and forth in an approximation of a nod, and tries not to fall over when the walls start spinning again. “No big deal,” he says, as much levity in his voice as he can muster. “At least hallucinations can’t actually do anything to me.”

Lance says something else, but Matt can’t hear him, stuck in a loop of his own words repeating in his head over and over. He sees glowing red eyes out of the corner of his eye and when he looks, they move with him, almost out of sight. Barely there. He digs his nail into his hand again. Hallucinations can’t actually do anything to me, they can’t actually do anything, it’s fine. It’s fine. “It’s fine.”

Where they touch, Lance feels solid and real and his skin is warm, a sensation that Matt soaks in with all the giddiness his deprived mind can muster up. Matt pulls him in close, skin to skin, and he’s so wrapped up in the sensation of warmth and of touch that he doesn’t realize for a long time that Lance is shivering. But he can’t be cold, Matt thinks. The cell is perfectly temperature controlled -- so much so that the utter neutrality of it makes him want to scream, and he has, before, counting the cracks over and over and over again to prove to himself that, look, there’s a discontinuity, not everything is the same, it’s different, it’s different.

There’s another word for it. He tries to think of it. Digs back through lists of vocabulary words, tripping over synonyms he’s supposed to know until he finds -- shaking. It’s shaking.

“You alright?” Matt asks, and it’s only with a great force of will that he manages not to get lost in the hilarity of the question. They’re captives, being tortured by the Galra. Of course he isn’t alright.

“I’m okay,” Lance says. His mouth is somewhere near Matt’s collarbone and the words tickle across his skin.

“Bullshit.”

That startles Lance into a wet-sounding laugh and while he doesn’t pull away -- presses closer, in fact -- he wipes at his eyes and sniffs. “‘M just really tired. My head hurts.”

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Matt remembers his mother doing the research, once, for her family of quirky scientists who like to pretend that they don’t need any rest. He remembers the symptoms of extreme sleep deprivation -- of all the things to remember, that’s what his brain latches onto, thanks very much, the asshole of an organ -- headache, dizziness. Check and check. Irritability, yeah probably (he remembers the way they could all tell when Katie stayed up all night working on some pet project, by the evil little gremlin who would appear in place of his baby sister in the mornings). Hallucinations -- well, that’s been going on for a while, data insufficient. Loss of equilibrium and sensory reception, again, data insufficient. There’s not much way to test that, in a tiny box of a cell with very little by way of sensory input. Then, adrenaline spikes, vocal slurring, muscle spasms. They’re not quite there yet, he doesn’t think. So somewhere less than the 48 hours mark. Probably. Are there hours in space? Are the hours in space the same length as the hours on Earth? Does it matter? 

Focus, Matt.

He drags his gaze away from the cracked walls again -- with no recollection of having looked that direction in the first place, he hates this -- and looks at the boy leaning on his shoulder. Still shaking. His face is wet and his breathing is loud and hitching and he looks pretty miserable, under the bruises, but well, why wouldn’t he. 

Wait. Wet face, stuttered breathing. That… means something. He hasn’t seen another human in so long, not since his father, he can’t quite remember...

“Oh, no,” Mat says with dawning horror. “No nonono, no crying, stop that. Uh, shh, c’mon, stop it. Don’t do that. Shh.”

Lance’s face turns red and warms against Matt’s skin. Matt cycles through the possible causes -- fever, maybe, heat stroke, unlikely, arousal, don’t be ridiculous, embarrassment, yeah, probably.

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Lance says, the pout clearly audible in his voice, and Matt flashes back vividly to the day before he’d left for Kerberos. Katie had refused to admit that she was upset -- jealous, yeah, sure, Katie has an envious streak to the moon and back, but not upset -- about their leaving until she’d knocked on the door of his childhood bedroom at three in the morning and crawled determinedly under the covers with him and he’d teased her for the tears, as much to hide his own anxiety and pre-emptively lonely emotions as to annoy her out of hers. Katie had eventually fallen asleep, curled up with her head cutting off the circulation to Matt’s arm and her fist bunched determinedly and possessively in his sleeping shirt, but Matt hadn’t. Shiro had made fun of him the next day, when he showed up to the launch without a wink of sleep -- “Wow, check out those bags, I bet they can see those from the Mars base.” His dad had joined in, and Matt had complained and punched Shiro in the stomach and sulked, and their first data dump from the Garrison had included a picture of himself, pouting with crossed arms, and Dad and Shiro laughing at him.

He vaguely registers hearing someone say, “I can’t help it, I’m tired,” and he’s still thinking of Katie, and Shiro and his dad, when the lights strobe again and it’s sudden and aggressively purple and he’s pulled violently out of his memories, and he screams.

“Whoa! Whoa, whoa,” someone’s saying, and he’s spinning and can barely hear anything over his heart pounding double-time in his head and he feels someone touching his face. Who is touching his face? He’s alone, Katie’s gone and Shiro’s gone and Dad is gone and --

He sees blue. “Lance?” he manages to gasp, and Lance nods, nearly nose-to-nose with him, hands firm on the sides of his jaw.

“Yeah, I’m right here, buddy, okay? You’re freaking out. It’s just the lights again, remember? They’ve been doing that all day -- night -- whatever. You gotta calm down, okay?”

“Shut up,” he says, not registering the hurt expression on Lance’s face as he draws back. “Shut up, I need, I need to, to breathe. Just gotta breathe. Panic attacks can’t kill me. Can’t…” Or can they? Does he really remember that correctly? What if he’s wrong? He feels like he’s choking. Heart attack. Like he’s falling.

Lance grabs his hand and jerks him forward, and Matt’s palm hits Lance’s bare chest with a dull thump. Lance’s other hand is still cupped around his cheek, bracketing his ear, and his voice is muffled when he says, “Just breathe in time with me, dude, okay?”

Match breathing. Okay. Matt can do that. He closes his eyes, so he can’t see the purple lights or the cell or the octopedes and spiders, and he tries to feel. But he can’t. He can’t feel his hands. He can’t feel his his fingertips, but he does feel his heart rate speeding up, edging back over into hyperventilation. 

And then there’s warmth around him, and he can hear Lance breathing next to his ear, and feel it against his arm, and he fights for it because he is a Holt and if there’s one thing to define Holts it’s that they’re stubborn fuckers and he is not going to lose his mind in this stupid Galran prison God knows how far from home. He won’t.

It isn’t until much later, when his breathing is calmer and his head is still spinning because he needed to sleep, like, a lifetime ago, that he realizes Lance is hugging him.

He didn’t know he’d forgotten what a human hug felt like. It’s nice.

“Irregular respiration,” Matt notes, half to himself. He twitches with surprise when Lance makes a disgruntled noise.

“Shut up,” Lance says, his breath hitching again. Matt hugs him back, or tries to, arms around back and gripping his own fingertips, physical comfort. “You okay now?” Lance asks, soft in his ear, and Matt nods.

“Oh, yeah, totally, never better, I love being a prisoner and panicking about everything, it’s great.”

He feels Lance shaking against him again, and wonders with alarm what he’s crying about this time, before he realizes that it’s giggling. “You’re nutty,” Lance snorts, and Matt grins despite himself.

“Yeah.”

And then it’s just a matter of waiting until the next bombastic interruption, and trying to catch snatches of sleep when they can.

“Can you die of sleep-deprivation?” Lance whines, face-down and spread-eagle on the ground, after yet another blast of light that cuts right through their eyelids, from every direction. Matt doesn’t know who thought it would be a good idea to make even the floor radiate blindingly bright light, but he has a lot of ideas of what he’d like to do with that person if he ever finds out. 

“It’s happened,” he answers, very matter-of-fact, and Lance squawks.

“What, seriously?”

“Yeah. You think I’d lie about that?”

Lance nods against the floor. “Yes. Definitely.”

After a moment’s reflection, Matt has to concede that. He probably would. He remembers his father telling him not to kiss frogs even if they do it in fairy tales because his tongue would grow long like a frog’s, and he remembers passing that advice on to Katie when she was old enough to catch them. It’d had the same effect on her that it did for him -- she immediately went out and caught and kissed as many amphibians as she could. Sadly, neither of them grew a prodigiously long tongue. He did build a robot frog with a fully articulated tongue once, though. Or was that Katie? He couldn’t remember. One of them had done it. He sticks his tongue out experimentally and if he crosses his eyes, he can just see the tip of it glowing in the bright light.

“Uh. What are you doing?”

“Nuhhtng,” Matt answers. He retracts his tongue with a gusty sigh and squints at Lance. “You look like shit,” he announces, and though Lance puffs up like an angry bird and opens his mouth to retort, Matt keeps talking before he can say anything. “This is ridiculous. Come here.” He opens his arms and wriggles his fingers when Lance just looks at him wearily. Just to be a jerk, he whistles and pitches his voice up. “Here, boy! C’mon!”

Lance crawls into his arms, slumping immediately into a boneless puddle of exhaustion even has he grumbles, “I hate you.”

“I had a thought,” Matt says, ignoring Lance’s complaint and trying not to slip into a spiral of self-loathing over how long it took him to figure it out, because he’s a literal genius, damn it all, and he hates the way he can feel his mind degrading day by day. He’s a little guy and, oh yeah, a prisoner, without so much as his glasses or a pair of underwear. He doesn’t have a lot left to take pride in, other than his big brain. If the Galra take that from them he’s going to kill every single one of them. Somehow. Details to be determined. “There’s no reason we can’t figure out a way for one of us to get some rest. At least your brain s-shit will probably get better. Unless comas happen. But at least you’d get to be asleep. But anyway. Sleep. I have an idea.”

Lance raises his head, expression equally hopeful and wary. Matt shoves it back down, wraps one hand over Lance’s eyes and uses the other to push his face into the crook between his neck and collarbone, mindful of the tender bump on the side of Lance’s head.

“What --”

“Shh. Shut up and sleep.”

Lance shifts against him, starts to say something, but Matt shushes him again and he falls into a somewhat sullen silence. It isn’t long before Lance’s eyelashes flutter against Matt’s fingers and it feel like the moths he and Katie used to catch under the eaves on late summer nights.

The next time the lights strobe, Matt can’t help but tense, but Lance remains still against him.

“Lance?” he asks. No response. Matt shivers, and listens to the sound of his breathing. He doesn’t know how long it lasts, but the mysterious food flap opens and a plate of purple goop appears at some point in the middle. Despite the unhappy twisting in his stomach, Matt doesn’t move. Some small altruistic part of him doesn’t want to disturb Lance’s sleep. Not when Lance’s fingers curl against his stomach and his eyes twitch and roll under Matt’s hand, so soft and… vulnerable. Frankly, Matt’s just surprised he has any altruism left. He’d thought that dried out long before the Kerberos mission.

Besides, his limbs have gone numb anyway. He can barely feel any of them, save the tiny prick of pain in the palm of his left hand.

He settles back into counting. Mental exercises, counting his breaths and Lance’s. One, one, two-two, three, four, three… their rhythms are off, and he slows himself again, falling back in synch. His eyes close more than once, completely involuntary after what must be two Earth days, now, at least, without sleep, always to be startled awake with the berserk flashing. 

If he ever gets out of this, he’s going to have some kind of complex about the colour purple. 

Lance shifts in his arms, and mutters and sighs his slow way into wakefulness. He noses into Matt’s neck and sighs something that sounds suspiciously like “hunk.”

“Not really, but I’m flattered,” Matt says dryly, and he grins at the slow confusion that crosses Lance’s face when he looks up. The grin drops abruptly, though, when he sees the exact moment Lance remembers where they are. He wishes, sharp and vicious, that they had anything worth waking up for. He hisses in pain when Lance sits up and blood flows into his arm, suddenly unrestricted, and it tingles like tiny knives up and down his blood vessels.

“You should’ve woken me up,” Lance says, a disapproving tone to his voice as he watches Matt massage his fingers gingerly. He stretches out his back -- Matt hears the bones creaking and cracking after being slouched over for who knows how long, and Matt leaves him to it, doing stretches of his own to try to regain some feeling of control over his own body. Lance is chattering about something, but Matt doesn’t really listen until he realizes there’s been a pause, and looks up to see Lance looking expectantly at him.

“What?”

“I said, your leg.” Lance juts his chin down to point at it, as if there’s any question about which leg he’s talking about. Matt wiggles the toes of his prosthetic.

“What about it?”

“It’s Galra tech, isn’t it?” Lance’s expression is serious, and when Matt nods, it grows contemplative. Lance rubs his chin like some kind of schemy cartoon character. “Could be useful. We’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“It’s kind of attached to me, I can’t really forget about it.”

Lance huffs and rolls his eyes like a teenager. But whatever he’s planning, he doesn’t share with the class, and Matt is too tired to wonder about it for more than a second or two. Besides, concussion brain. Probably nothing. And Lance is quickly distracted -- “this food goo is purple!”, said as if that’s a novelty and not something that makes Matt want to throw up everywhere. He really, really hates the colour purple.

“I like the sound your leg makes,” Lance says, off-hand, with a mouthful of purple goop and Matt’s head in his lap. Matt didn’t know his leg made a sound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consistency in chapter length? What's that?


	3. Chapter 3

“Dude, no way, you did not just quote Star Wars at me.  What are you, a dinosaur?”

Matt laughs, head tilted back, squinting towards the blurry ceiling.  “Hey, you recognized it.  It’s a classic.  It’s hilarious, the sounds the ships make?  When they’re in space?  All those lasers and, and… they’re like --” he raises his hands to make little finger pistols, “ _pchew, pchew!_  As if!  I have extensive space knowledge, I’ll have you know, as a doctor of, of space shit.  There’s no such thing as a _pchew_ laser.  That’s just dumb.”  He laughs again.  Noises in space.  It’s ridiculous.  Twenty-first century science fiction is hilarious.  He laughs himself silly, rocking back and forth against the wall.  “Obi-Wan never told you,” he says, in a faux baritone, “what happened to your…” he trails off because, no, nope, not going there today.

He tilts his head to look at Lance for a reaction.  Lance is looking back at him -- no, he’s not, he’s facing Matt but he’s looking at something else.  It’s weird to see that expression from the outside, Matt thinks, humming under his breath.  

Trading off sleeping shifts has definitely been the most brilliant idea Matt’s had since he was recaptured and thrown into solitary.  Or.  Dualitary?  Whatever.  Point is, he’s still a genius, ha ha ha, take that Galra overlords.  He’s still exhausted and his body hurts but it’s a little easier to think, now, and having Lance there?  It’s so much easier to tell what’s real.  Lance doesn’t react to the hallucinations.  So Matt doesn’t need to panic when he sees the drone leveling a blaster at his leg, because Lance is just chattering about some made up, fantasy alien planets.  Mind-control-blocking cnidarians and animals the size of planets with inorganic crystalline surface extrustions.  He has a ridiculous imagination.  Matt has no idea how he comes up with half of these things.  Could be the concussion.  Either way, kid should write a novel.  When Matt dares to look up again, the drone is gone.  It’s just the faintly-glowing space-plaster walls.  No need to panic, he tells himself, as if that’s ever stopped anything.  

It’s also helpful, when Matt wakes up in screaming confusion, still seeing Shiro covered in blood, or Katie, small and angry under the purple lights, and Lance is there to remind him of what’s real.  Matt likes to think of himself as a resilient kind of guy but when he’s hyperventilating and covered in snot and tears, well, it’s nice to have someone to lean on.  He won’t deny that.

“We’re gonna get out of here,” Lance promises after one such incident, while Matt is still reeling from the phantom pain of a sword in his knee.  They’re wrapped up in each other.  Lance is warm and solid and his heartbeat is steady, and Matt needs that.

He gasp-laughs, one harsh bubble of sound, and digs his chin into Lance’s shoulder.  “Optimism is great, but don’t kid yourself.  We’re never getting out of here.  Never gonna happen.  Nobody’s ever escaped from them.  Not when they want you.”  He remembers explosions and alarms and laughter and electricity and twitches under the weight of memory.

Matt thinks back to being in the mines, talking to the other prisoners.  He’d been hopeful then, too.  He and his dad had been determined to escape, stubborn as Holts always are.  They’d sabotage the equipment, priming it to break down or to explode, and stealing what little pieces they could make off with.  By the end of it, they’d amassed quite a collection of parts.

“Too bad Katie’s not here,” Matt remembers saying.  And he’d meant that she was the engineer, more than he was.  Matt liked living things and formerly-living things, organics, microbes, enzymes, fossils.  He could identify the class of a skeletal sample from one or two bones.  A photo.  Mammals and reptiles, he could make a full ID from the whole skeleton or a partial DNA profile.  Katie was never as good with living things, but she was the builder.  She’d made her first functional robot when she was six.  It opened cabinets and retrieved items off of high shelves.  It was brilliant.  That’s what Matt had meant.

But his father had said, in a voice icy-quiet, “Don’t ever say that.”

If he thinks back, that was probably the first night he’d dreamed about Katie being captured.  And a few days later, that was the first time they’d tried to escape.  They failed.  Obviously.

“Nobody ever escapes,” the base commander had sneered, fangs bared in a terrifying grin that Matt remembers through a haze of pain.  “Zarkon sees everything.”

“Nobody ever escapes,” Matt repeats.

Lance is silent for a long time.  He brushes his fingers along the edges of the plating on Matt’s leg, and Matt has to bite his own tongue until it bleeds to keep from flinching away.  Finally, Lance says, quiet as a whisper, “Shiro did.”

Matt’s mind stutters and shatters.  “Shiro’s dead,” he says, choking on his own gasping breath.  He hears the roar of the crowd, in the arena, hears Shiro yelling.  Everything smells like blood and fear and decay and sweat, and his leg hurts, it _hurts_.  He claws at it, trying to scramble away.  He doesn’t know where, but he has to get away.  His head is filled with shouts and screams and somewhere distant his own voice saying, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead dead dead _dead_ \--”

The amphibian-like alien grabs his shoulders and Matt cowers against him.  “Whoa, whoa,” the alien says, “Calm down, it’s okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you freak out.”  His knee hurts, and Matt reaches down to put pressure on the injury.  Pressure and elevation, first aid, don’t let it bleed out -- but when he touches the leg it’s hard and cool and vibrates ever-so-slightly under his fingertips.

“What’s happening?” he asks the Galra drone standing guard.  “What’s happening?”

“I’m sorry,” the alien says again, his voice high and scared.  But… that’s not right, is it?  Matt remembers this alien.  They were kept in a holding cell together, he’s a gentle, grandfatherly type.  And he sounds like Matt’s great-uncle, an old man with a pack-a-day smoking habit.  Not… not like a kid.  

“Hey man, you with me?”

The aliens are gone.  He can’t hear the arena anymore, can barely hear anything, just a heartbeat and breathing and someone speaking.  He knows that voice.  “Shiro?”

“No.  I’m sorry.  It’s me.  Lance.”

“Lance?”

Matt shakes his head, and everything around him is that almost-white, bright purple again.  Right.  The cell.  “Sorry,” he manages to say, as he tries to calm his breathing.  “This is… is this real?”

Lance squeezes his shoulders.  “What are you seeing?” he asks softly.

“Uh.” Matt digs his nail into his palm.  The manacles tug on the tender skin at his wrists and he flinches.  “You.  The cell.  Empty bowl of goop.  Guard in the corner.”  The sentry drone doesn’t move but its eye slits glow red and Matt feels pinned under the stare, like a beetle mounted on a purple canvas.

“There’s no guard,” Lance says.  Matt’s not convinced.  He can see it very clearly, just standing still as a statue in the corner beside the door, opposite them.  He watches it warily and doesn’t see Lance glancing back and forth between him and the corner.

Matt jumps despite himself when Lance stands and takes the short two steps to the opposite side of the cell.  “Where’s the guard?”  he asks.  “Here?”  He takes a step to the left.  “Here, maybe?”

As soon as Lance steps onto the guard’s foot -- or where the guard’s foot should be -- the drone vanishes.  A hysterical giggle bubbles up in Matt’s throat and he curls in on himself, hunched with hands over his eyes and body shaking with laughter.  “I can’t tell at all!” he wails, still laughing.  “It didn’t work this time!”  He pulls his hand away and stares closely at his palm.  There’s a red smear of blood across it and more welling up from the cut.  He digs his nail into it and twitches at the pain.  He does it again.  He rubs his hands together to spread the droplets of blood and places a careful handprint on the floor beside his artificial leg.  It sucks in the purple light and he stares at it, dark against the diffuse glowing.

Lance’s voice is full of dismay.  “Aw, man, don’t do that!  You’re gonna hurt yourself.”  He grabs Matt’s wrist -- the action pulls at the singed skin under the manacles and Matt yelps despite himself.  Lance looks apologetic but he keeps a firm grip on Matt’s wrist until the bout of hysteria has passed and Matt sits limp against the wall.

Lance settles next to him with a guilty air.  “Sorry,” he says again.  “I didn’t realize mentioning Shiro would set you off like that.”

Set him off.  Like he’s a firework.  Or a bomb.  Tick tock.  Matt stares at his mismatched feet.  “S’okay.  I didn’t either.”  He refuses to think about the last time he saw Shiro, and hums a song from an old Disney movie under his breath to distract himself.  Compartmentalization.  Report the facts.

“They sent Shiro to the gladiator arena,” he reports, “I was going to be thrown in, too, but…” his mechanical toes give an involuntary twitch.  He counts three steady breaths.  “I heard about the… the gladiator.  Myzax.  There’s no way Shiro could’ve beaten him.  Shiro’s dead.”

Lance puffs up his cheeks and blows them out like a deflating balloon.  “Boy, you’re quite the optimist.”  He rolls his eyes to emphasize the sarcasm.  “Glad to know you have such faith in your friend, I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear it.”

“Lance, what are you --”

“Shiro’s alive,” Lance interrupts, firmly and confidently.  “He escaped and made it back to Earth.  He’s alive.  I promise.”

To his horror, Matt feels his eyes stinging.  He clenches his teeth and his fists, shoves the spike of emotion back and walls it off.  He takes a moment to count his breaths, in and out.  “How can you be sure?”

“Dude, I was there.  I saw him crash land outside the Garrison with my own two eyes.  Cross my heart and swear to die,” says the boy with the traumatic brain injury.

Despite himself, Matt gets the mental picture of Golden Boy Shiro walking back into the Garrison after being MIA, complete with trumpet fanfare and some kind of ticker tape parade because this is his imagination and why not, and he snorts.  “Bet Iverson lost his shit when Shiro showed up, huh?  Man, wish I’d seen that.”  When Lance twists his lips, he adds, “What?”

“Well,” Lance stretches out the syllable, “that’s not _exactly_ how it happened.”

Matt sits up straight.  “Tell me.”

And Lance digs into the telling with relish, clearly someone who enjoys weaving a good story, as he has to get up and walk back and forth, complete with grand gestures.  By the end of it all, Matt is, to put it lightly, fucking pissed.  “Pilot error,” he seethes,  “ _Pilot error._  I can’t fucking -- Shiro is -- was -- is the best goddamn pilot in the Garrison, and they said we _crashed_ because of _pilot error?_   Unbelieveable.”  He simmers over that, too lost in a swirl of anger to pick out the correct words from the maelstrom.   

“I know, right?”  Lance throws his hands in the air.  “It’s totally ridiculous!  As if someone like Shiro would just crash.  He’s so much better than that.”  Having thus vented his feelings to apparent satisfaction, Lance plops back down beside Matt, and without thinking they press against each other.  Contact.  

“He was okay, though, right?”  Matt finally brings himself to ask the question, determinedly not making eye contact.  He doesn’t want to know the answer.  He needs to know.  “Not like --” he waves a hand vaguely, in a gesture that somehow manages to encompass his entire self.

Lance gives him an odd look, and then performs a very loud, very fake, and very abrupt yawn.  “Well, I’m tired.  Wake me up if the food goo comes.”  And with that blatant evasion, he curls into Matt’s side, pointedly pulls Matt’s hand over his eyes, and falls asleep with enviable ease.

Matt sits frozen with horror.  

When Lance starts to twitch and mumble in his sleep -- and this time there’s Shiro’s name, in there, among the other words that Matt can’t quite make out or put any meaning to -- Matt makes the Herculean effort to pull himself together and sing at the sky, out of tune and stuttering over the words because he doesn’t know what, if any, significance there is to Lance’s brain-addled sleep-talking, but he doesn’t want the Galra to find out, either.

There aren’t very many scars, under the fading bruises on Lance’s body.  He can’t have been a prisoner for long.  

If he’s even real at all, Matt’s traitorous brain whispers, and Matt digs his nail into his palm and sing-yells himself hoarse.  
  
“We’re gonna escape,” he whispers to himself, when Lance’s fretful muttering stops.  And then again, and louder.  “We’re going to escape.  We’re going to escape!  Hear that, you purple fuckers?”  He’s screaming now, muscles tight and heartbeat ringing in his ears.  “We’re going to get out of here!  You couldn’t keep Shiro and you can’t keep me, I’ll get out of here and I’ll butcher every last fucking one of you!”  His manacles snap together and fling him against the wall, skin burning, and Lance is shouting something but Matt can’t hear him over his own desperate laughter.


	4. Chapter 4

There is nothing Matt has come to dread more than waking up, now that he can finally sleep.  The floor is hard and his bones ache and the burns around his wrists fester, but without the terror of the purple strobing, at least he can sleep.

It’s some kind of cruel irony, then, that after needing it so badly, he’s too scared to close his eyes.  

“You gotta sleep,” Lance wheedles, sighing in frustration when Matt sets his jaw and shakes his head.  “Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m literally a genius, I’m not stupid.”

“Well, you’re acting like a baby!”  Lance snaps.  “And I’d know, I have four little brothers and sisters!  You know who refuses naps?  Three-year-olds!”

Matt’s answer is both succinct and non-verbal.

“Honestly.”  Lance tuts and clucks like a mother hen, and flutters around Matt in a state of ruffled indignation.  Matt, as the older, more experienced prisoner in this particular situation, shows his maturity by sticking out his tongue and trying not to tip over from exhaustion.

Lance gives him a despairing look and mutters, “Pidge is gonna kill me,” under his breath.

“Who’s Pidge?”  Matt asks.

“Huh?”  Lance looks caught off-guard.  Something like when a rabbit gets surprised out in the open -- wide eyes, suddenly still.  Trying not to be noticed.  Matt wrinkles his nose up and down and imagines the rabbit bolting under a hedge.

“Pidge.  You’ve mentioned it before.  That’s a name, right?  Who’s Pidge?”

“Take a nap and I’ll tell you after.”

Matt laughs at the audacity of this statement.  “Conniving bastard,” he says approvingly.  Blatant attempted manipulation, and not very artful, but Matt can appreciate the effort.

“Guilty.”  Lance stretches out his legs and pats his hip.  “Lay it on me, Space Case,” he announces, and he wraps his hands easily around Matt’s face even as Matt snickers over the nickname and tries to make himself comfortable against Lance’s bony body.  He can still almost-see the lights, when they flash, and he pushes his face harder into Lance’s side.

The reason for Matt’s fear, as far as he can tell, is twofold.  First, he’s scared of the dreams.  There’s a certain curse to having a memory like his -- what his used to be, anyway.  No matter how hard he tries to repress, his subconscious fishes deep and it drags out everything Matt doesn’t want to think about while he’s awake and plays it as dreams for a captive audience of one.  He dreams of running from the Galra, endlessly running along the surface of Kerberos, stumbling and awkward in his space suit, mired in the gluey snow.  He hears his father yelling and Shiro shouting but he doesn’t go back for them, he just runs, runs until he can’t breathe, his lungs feel like they’re about to burst, and suddenly he rockets off the surface of the moon, flung out into space where everything cuts off.  He can’t see anything.  He can’t hear anything, and he screams as hard as he can but no sound comes out.

That’s when he wakes, and he jackknifes up even as he screams and gasps for breath.  Someone grabs his shoulder and Matt shies away.

“It’s just me,” Lance says again, hands held up in front of him.  “It’s just me.  You had a nightmare.  We’re okay.”

Matt looks at him and sees a mosaic of bruises, bloodshot and bleary eyes, greasy hair.  Thick manacles.  Hunched shoulders.  And everywhere, sickly purple light.  “We’re not okay.”

Lance tries again to hug him, and this time Matt lets him, shaking and disoriented and exhausted.

The nightmares are awful.  But waking up?  Waking up is worse.

Matt gulps for air.  “You promised me something,” he remembers, grasping for a distraction.  “Before I fell asleep.  You said…” His mind is still boiling and unstable and Matt makes an angry, frustrated noise because he can’t remember.  He knows he knows, he knows the memory is there, but he can’t find it.  “You said you’d tell me something.  What was it?”  He’s stuck on the feeling of floating off into space and he digs his fingers into Lance’s arm to stay grounded.

Lance laughs and it’s light and airy and totally false.  Matt squints suspiciously.  “Nah, man, you’ve got it backwards.  You were gonna tell me about Katie.”

Katie?  Matt falters.  That doesn’t… he thought it was something else.  The other way around?  No, that wouldn’t make sense, what could Lance tell him about Katie?  He worries at the scab in his palm and tries without success to think of what he doesn’t remember.  “Oh.  You... What do you want to know?”

“Anything.”  Lance shrugs.  “What’s she like?”  

Matt grins despite himself, drifting backwards into memories.  “She’s a total shithead,” he says proudly.  Lance guffaws, like he hadn’t been expecting that answer.  “She is.  She’s a genius, obviously, and she can build _anything_ , but I swear she never uses her powers for good.  She’s totally evil.”

“I believe that,” Lance snickers.  “If she’s anything like you…”

“Wow.  Rude.”

In a lot of ways, Lance reminds him of Katie.  He’s loud and brash and laughs at Matt’s stupid jokes even when they make him groan.  He’s full of bravado, tough and quick to argue, but Matt sees through all that -- it’s hard not to, when captivity and deprivation lays them bare in both a physical and metaphorical sense.  Lance is a big, skinny beanpole of a softie.

Matt hates that Lance is here.  Obviously, he doesn’t like being a prisoner in space, either, but...

“Hey, how old are you, anyway?”  he asks randomly. 

Lance gives him an inquisitive look.  “Uh, eighteen?  I think.”

Eighteen.  Matt swears explosively, rubbing at the burns on his wrists.  Eighteen.  He’s a teenager.  He’s a _kid_.  He’s not that much older than Katie, Katie’s only… he can’t remember.  He doesn’t have a clue.  When he left, she was… thirteen?  Fourteen?  And how much time has passed since then?  He hisses through his teeth and his fists clench and twitch.

“Matt, whoa,” Katie says.  That’s right, she’d worn that dress the day they left, he remembers her being excited over getting to dress up.  He remembers teasing her over the girly frills and heeled shoes and he remembers her demonstrating the heel on his toe while he laughed at her.  

“Stay with me, Matt,” she says, blue eyes worried, but he can’t, he has to go to space, he’s going into space with his dad for his very first time and they’re going out further than mankind has ever gone before, they’re pioneers, space pirates, and --

Katie doesn’t have blue eyes.  Matt cringes and shakes his head.  His ears ring, but it’s muffled, like they’re full of water.  He covers them with his hands but it doesn’t stop the ringing.

“Stay with me,” Lance says again.  “C’mon, Matt.  Where are you?”

Matt groans, and closes his eyes against the purple light.  “Here.  I’m right here.  Sorry.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.  Yeah.  I, uh.  Thought you were Katie.”

“...oh.”  Lance goes quiet.

She’s safe, Matt thinks.  She’s home with Mom and they’re both fine, they’ve never even heard of the Galra, they’re fine.  He also thinks that the Galra are everywhere, unstoppable, and he almost doubles over at the idea of his tolerant mother and smartass little sister thrown into the gladiator arena to die like Shiro while he rots in a purple cell.

Without warning, Matt’s manacles hum and snap together and jolt his damaged wrists so hard that he blacks out from the surge of pain before he even has a chance to scream.  Someone else is screaming, though.

 

*

 

When he comes to, he realizes that he’s thrown up on himself -- purple food goop, and he struggles to fling it away, away, off of his body, get it away --

And he’s alone.

“Lance?” he asks, because this is another hallucination, everything is bright, he just can’t see right now, his brain is screwing with him because it’s been tortured and deprived.  “Lance?”

Nobody answers.  “Lance!” he calls, louder, pushing himself to his feet and stumbling the small circumference of the cell.  His flesh leg gives out and he topples against the wall and his heart drums staccato.  “Where is he?”  he screams at the sky.  “Where is he!  Give him back, you goddamn purple bastards, give him _back!_ ”

He has no concept of how much time passes.  He counts his breathing, obsessively, as it gets faster and faster and he can’t distinguish individual breaths anymore.  He traces the cracks on the floor with his finger, bent double and shaking.  He tries to list the names of the chemical elements, in order, but he can’t get past rubidium even though he memorized the periodic table when he was eight.  He wants to scream.  So he does, he screams himself hoarse, wordless cries alternating with furious rants directed towards the Galra and the Garrison and everyone who has ever wronged him.

His prosthetic leg starts vibrating, and it’s a sound, so deep he can’t quite hear it.  Subsonic.  The joints between the plating glow purple-red.  He shrieks, scrabbling away from it and sobbing in confusion and fear when he can’t get away, and the glowing subsides.

“What's happening?” he yells. His fingers grab for the doorway but it's full of glowing green octopedes and he jumps, falling onto his back with Shiro crouched over him and roaring for blood.  His knee hurts and he can feel it leaking warm and sticky, and smell it as it festers and rots.  The stench fills his nose and makes him retch.

“I want to go home,” he whimpers in the feverish delirium. Someone hushes him with a sibilant whisper and the foot that isn't there anymore cramps and hurts and he falls after it into an endless mine shaft.

 

*

 

He hurts.  He digs his nail into his palm and watches a bead of blood well up and sit there, waiting.  Waiting for what, Matt doesn’t know, but he waits with it.  The point of focus helps, and gradually he starts to think straighter, is able to see the delineation between reality and memory and hallucination.  The octopedes waver and wink away and Matt grins at this small triumph.

“Not today, Zarkon,” he says, and squeezes his hand into a fist.

Lance is sitting beside him.  Matt falls over with a shout of surprise.  He can’t, for the life of him, figure out how -- or when -- he got back.  Or did they even take him in the first place?  Is he really here at all?  Matt squeezes his fist tighter to keep himself grounded.  “Get your head in the game,” he mutters with a fake accent and all the awkward swagger of a boy who never played a sport in his life.  He’s a nerd, okay, he doesn’t need sports.

“Is this real?” he asks Lance.  He thinks it is, this time.  He feels lucid.  Ish.  Only minimal paranoia.  He knows where he is and where his leg is.  He doesn’t know where Lance is, or... where he was?  He doesn’t know.  

Lance doesn’t respond.  He’s curled up in a little ball, arms wrapped around his knees and ankles incongruously crossed, staring in a way that chills Matt to the bone.  Matt crouches in front of him and waves a hand.

“Hey. Heeey.  Anybody in there?  Man, and I thought I was supposed to be the space case, huh, but you’re r-really giving me a run for my money here, hey?  The ol’ college try.  Galaxy Garrison try.  Hey, imagine that, surprise!  This was a simulator all along!  Wanted to see how you’d react to stress, and you failed!  Sorry, Holt, so sorry about your marbles, we can’t find them anywhere, musta lost them all!  Shoulda kept better hold of those but you all signed a waiver so too bad for you, har-de-har-har!  Now go to class.”  He cracks up, doubling forward until his forehead rests on Lance’s knee.  

“That’s not funny,” comes Lance’s voice, uncharacteristically soft.

“Maybe you just have a shitty sense of humour,” Matt shoots back, and leans harder.

Lance sniffles a quiet, “Maybe,”  and all of Matt’s wayward protective instincts go haywire.  

“No no, no, not again with the crying thing, I can’t do the crying thing, c’mon man.”  He twitches anxiously, willing the edge of panic away, fighting against the desire to wrap this kid up in a cocoon or something and keep him safe.  To curl around him like their dog used to do when he was upset or when Katie was hiding and sulking in a corner somewhere.  Nothing like the panting and snoring and warm, soft body of an old dog pressed up against you to keep the bad feelings away.  Matt has a random stray thought wondering if the dog’s still alive.

“I hate this,” Lance admits.  Matt nods wordlessly and falls forward on top of Lance.  He curls his arms around Lance’s shoulders and clings in what seems, to him, to be a rather unconvincing hug, as far as these things go, but Lance melts into it with a sigh.

“They hurt you?”  Matt had looked him over quickly, when he’d first noticed Lance again, cataloguing.  No new damage.  Externally.  As an unwilling amputee with an alien prosthetic and no shortage of brand-new neuroses, Matt can say with some confidence that the external damage is probably the least damaging.

Lance nods.  Matt holds him tighter, and they both shake and stare off at their own demons.  
  
Finally, Matt sums it all up in the best way he can think of:  “Fuck this.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter one today, but we're moving things along.

“Now, this is important.  Super, duper important.  Cannot stress how important this is.  Understand?  Very important.”  Matt’s mouth is next to Lance’s ear, and they’re facing opposite directions but Matt can practically feel Lance rolling his eyes.  “Suuuuper important.”

“That tickles,” Lance complains, and shrugs his shoulder up.  Matt digs his chin into it -- a more effective weapon than anyone would assume, given his natural predilection to sharp features and the prominent boniness that comes from long captivity.

“Important,” Matt hisses warningly, and then “Shh!” when Lance complains loudly that he gets it, already, just spit it out.

Matt pulls back a bit, just enough to go nose-to-nose with Lance and stare slightly cross-eyed into his face.  He holds the stare for a minute or two, then leans in to whisper again.  “If I start to lose it you gotta pull me back.”

Matt has A Plan.  A very important, capital-letters-necessary kind of Plan.  Several things have come together at once, like puzzle pieces;  Lance had to have come from somewhere, right, and even though he’s been admirably close-lipped on the subject, the Galra must want something from him.  Obviously.  Given the whole interrogation-torture shebang.  And yeah, okay, taking so long to put that together isn’t his best and brightest moment, but he’s under a lot of stress, here.  But anyway.  Lance probably didn’t come directly from Earth; if the Galra wanted something from Earth they’d do better than to abduct some cadet teenager (Matt imagines the alternate timeline where he ends up with Iverson as a cellmate and cringes).  Though Matt also has some difficulty imagining the reality where the Garrison sends cadets up into actual space, so he really doesn’t have a clue how Lance ended up in space in the first place.  But hopefully, presumably, he has allies, somewhere, who can help them out.  Allies Lance might be able to call on for backup if they weren’t in a glowing purple isolation cell on some prison ship way out beyond any galaxy Matt has ever imagined.  One can only hope, anyway.  Second, Matt is a big brother and part of the Big Brother Creed means that he’s allowed to mess with his little sibling as much as humanly possible, but if someone else tries?  Hell no.  And yeah, okay, Lance isn’t Katie, but.  He’d want someone to do it for her.  He’d want someone to take down any purple motherfucker that messed with his little sister.  The fact that both Katie and Lance are more than competent enough to fight their own battles doesn’t matter.  This is a point of pride, here.  Lance is his now and nobody messes with Matt’s things.  Third is… well.  Matt has always been the competitive type.  And not particularly modest, if he’s being honest, which hey, he usually is, because he’s a genius and people should listen to what he has to say.  So his competitive spirit combined with the fact that he’s sick of being both bored to tears and scared to hysteria for every moment of every day… and knowing, now -- or believing, at least, which is good enough for him at this point -- that Shiro managed to escape the Galra and make it back to Earth?  Shiro’s a great guy and an excellent pilot, but Matt is at least six times smarter than him.  He has two doctorate degrees, for God’s sake, and at an age when most of his so-called peers would be barely finishing undergraduate programs.  

If Shiro can figure out how to escape then Matt can totally do it too.  Again.  For good this time.

He has A Plan.  They’re going to get the heck out of dodge, as his dad would say, and -- Matt’s thoughts immediately derail, following his father as they sneak through a mine shaft, moving as fast as they can without letting the machine parts clank together, toeing the line between stealth and speed --

“Aw, fuck, no, goddammit, bad timing, timing, timing,” he mutters, pounding his fists on the sides of his head and squinting his eyes shut.  “Not now, no, no no, focus, Matt, c’mon.”

He feels a tugging on his wrists and immediately freezes, in anticipation of the painful  _ snap _ together and being thrown against the wall panel.  It doesn’t come, though, and he opens his eyes to blue.

“I’ve got you,” Lance says.  “Just relax and focus.”

“Relax and focus.  Right.  Relax.  I’m totally relaxed.  Definitely the most relaxing situation I’ve ever been in, who needs tropical beaches or big libraries to relax, this is fine, super fine.  I got this.  I am very relaxed.”  He babbles away, not even listening to his own words as he tries to regain his slippery mental footing.  Put that thought in a box and tuck it away, he thinks, and even imagines the action of doing so.  Close up the box.  Mark it for later.  Dewey decimal.  Focus.

“What do you see?” Lance asks, but Matt shakes his head.

“I’m here.  It’s fine.  I got this.”

“Yeah?”

Matt just nods, still fighting with the flashback.  He exhales long and low when the panic edges back more into the side of reality.

Lance makes a grand gesture and quirks an eyebrow.  “So?” he demands.  “How’d I do?”

For a moment, Matt gapes at him.  Then he snickers despite himself and pinches Lance’s hip.  “Awful.  That was a terrible showing.  Zero out of ten, would not recommend as a brain babysitter.”  Lance makes an exaggerated display of being offended and the moment of levity gives Matt the last few seconds he needs to pull himself back into some semblance of togetherness.

He holds his hands out and wiggles his fingers. “Gimme.”

With another eye-roll, Lance holds out one arm and Matt gingerly takes his wrist and squints over the manacle.  Chances are, he was shackled shortly before he became Matt’s cellmate.  The skin under them is an inflamed, angry red, and Matt winces sympathetically, but the wounds aren't nearly as deep as Matt’s.  He'd be jealous, but from the tingly numbness in his fingertips Matt figures that he's fried a couple of nerves, which does dull the pain a bit.  Small blessings.  He’s so lucky.

They've poked at the manacles enough before that Matt is confident in his assumption that the Galra won't fry them for looking.  He's still nervous though.  He's been burned before.  Pun intended and kind of upsetting.

The manacles are smooth, apparently seamless pieces of Galra tech, but they had to have gone on somehow, right, and therefore there must be some kind of a locking system, a hinge, something.  Matt wishes he had a magnifying glass or loupe, or at least his glasses. Dim eyesight and numb fingertips do not make for the best of scientific instrumentation.  He mutters while he works, and Lance takes a page out of Matt’s book of crazy and starts singing something loud and fast to cover it up.

It's a good idea -- well, of course it is, it's Matt’s idea -- but Matt’s focus is still tenuous at best and he gets distracted.  “What is that, Spanish?” he asks.

Lance nods without stopping and makes a gesture that Matt interprets to mean, “get back to work, you crazy bastard.”

Matt doesn't speak Spanish. His Japanese isn't bad, after three months of space lessons with Shiro on the way to Kerberos, just for something to do.  And he's probably the only one in all of intergalactic space who speaks Latin.  Take that, haters.  He's a biologist to his core; it's helpful, no matter how much people snicker or roll their eyes at him for it.  And it’s fun to be able to call Katie names and watch her seethe over not knowing what it means and being too proud to just ask.  

He starts listing things -- body parts, bones, from the top down, to test himself, and comes up positive.  Only a few stumbles.  He takes a breath and gets back to work.

He’s not sure what he’s looking for, specifically.  Some kind of “press here to release” button would be great.  Maybe a hinge.  Or even a seam.

He finds nothing, and pulls back with a noise of frustration.  He tries to scruff a hand through his hair but it gets caught in the tangles, and that has him even more annoyed.  

“Listen, don’t ask,” Lance starts, “but stick out your leg?”

“Wh --”

“I said don’t ask!”

Matt blinks at him for a moment, and then figures, what the hell.  He lifts and extends his leg and wiggles his dirty toes in Lance’s face.  Lance screws his face up and shoves his foot away.

“Gross, ew, I don’t want to see your gnarly toenails.  Other foot, genius.”

Matt doesn’t have an “other” foot, exactly.  He glances down at his prosthetic and flexes it at the ankle.  He can feel where his own muscles stop, connecting to the synthetic nerves that he assumes power the movement in his leg.  There’s no sensation in the leg, but he feels the strain where his own leg ends and the prosthetic beings, just above the knee.  Where the knee used to be.  Figuring out how to balance on the thing and trust it to hold him when he walked had been a fun adventure.

He holds the leg up obligingly.  Lance touches his manacle to the ankle joint.  Immediately, the edges of the plating in Matt’s leg light up, glowing pink, and bright lines of light trace across the manacle.  Matt’s mouth drops open, only to immediately snap back and bite into his tongue when both of their manacles hum with electricity and Lance yelps in pain.  The shock of it, both physical and mental, knocks Matt over.  
  
The ceiling, somewhere above him, is still blurry.  He can’t make out any of the cracks.  Matt starts to giggle, and soon enough graduates into full-body laughter.  “They didn’t like that!” he crows.  “We’re getting somewhere, man, we’re getting somewhere!”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit's going down, y'all.

Emotional whiplash is a serious problem in Matt’s life.  Among others, but seriously, his brain is broken, he can’t deal with this.  

The Galra drones come and drag Lance away again, while Matt shouts and writhes on the floor, trapped to the wall by the stupid manacles.  “Don’t you lay a fucking finger on him, you cybernetic dickheads, give him back.  Give him _back_!”  This time, Matt remains more-or-less lucid, while they take him and for a period afterwards, until the manacles disengage and he realizes the prickling numbness around the edge of his left hand has spread and he can’t straighten his fingers.  And then he careens into a vortex of screaming, wordless fear, and he huddles in a corner with his arms over his head.  He covers his ears, but he can hear his mother screaming and his father crying and Katie yelling and he begs for it to stop.

Something wet trickles down the side of his face and he recoils in disgust.  His hand is smeared with blood, dripping with slow consistency out of a series of deep gouges in his palm.  He blinks, thinking, trying to think, and goes to lick the blood away.  And immediately throws up.  The vomit practically glows, purple on purple, and his head spins.

“Pr-precambrian,” he starts.  “Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic.  Archean -- Eoarchean, Paleoarchean, Mesoarchean, Neoarchean.  Proterozoic… Paleoproterozoic, Siderian, Rhyacian, Orosirian, Statherian.  Mesoproterozoic, Calymmian, Stenian… no, no, Ectasian, Stenian…”  He works his way forward through time, and despite another stumble during the Neoproterozoic, he’s speaking with confidence by the time he gets to the Phanerozoic and by the time he gets to the Mesozoic, he’s yelling the periods, “Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous!”   He sucks in a shaky breath that tumbles somewhere between laughter and panic.

“Okay,” he pants.  “Okay.”  

Wiping his mouth, he tucks himself against the wall, beside the manacle lockplate, and sits with his prosthetic leg crossed over his lap.  It’s not something he’s examined in much detail, given how he came to have it, and scientific curiosity be damned he’s still a little reluctant.  His memories of of its origin are blessedly fuzzy.  He’s not sure if he can handle learning -- remembering -- anything else he doesn’t want to know.  Still, the manacles react to whatever tech is in his leg.  Panicky brain or no, he has to look.  There might be something important they can use to escape.

He taps the plating around the shin with the manacle on his wrist and pulls away quickly.  No reaction.  A slightly longer touch yields the same result.  Matt grumbles under his breath.  He moves from the shin down to his ankle and tries again.  This time, the light patterning appears, and despite himself Matt jumps.  The lighting lingers for a second or two before fading back into nothing.  A deep breath later and he touches them together again and holds it.  The markings on the manacle look like Galran lettering -- he recognizes the sharp angles from labels and work rosters during his time on the mining colonies.  He sees the less complex forms he knows represent numbers.  “Prisoner designation, maybe?’ he mutters.  “Hmm.”  If he wracks his brain, he can come up with a few collections of letters -- words, probably, but he doesn’t know -- that he could guess the meaning to.  Assuming, of course, that the written Galran language uses a segmental script, and not, say, syllabaric or logographic.  Probably not ideographic, at least, based on what Matt’s seen, and thank whatever god for that because then he’d really be screwed.

“Bet Shiro could figure this out,” Matt says out loud, thinking about their days preparing for Kerberos in the Garrison, making fun of Shiro for taking “like eight million language courses, how do you not get them confused all the time.” (“So says the guy who can look at a fossil and know what it is and what geologic time period it came from by year and name.  What a nerd.”)  

Obviously, nobody answers, and Matt reminds himself to focus.  Alien writing, decipher the code, go.  There’s a sequence of symbols that look familiar to what he he’d always assumed were exit signs, in the mines.  He remembers laughing at that -- one constant across space, other than, you know, the whole prison camp thing.  Exit signs.  He wonders about the workplace health and safety and construction site regulations in the Galran empire.  

Next to the possible “exit”, there’s a symbol that Matt squints at.  It’s subtly different in its construction than the letters.  A more rounded shape in a closed circle, nothing like the jutting angles of the rest of the apparent alphabet.  It looks an awful lot like the thumbprint scanners the Garrison uses for its medium-security offices, so he presses his thumb to it experimentally.  There’s a quiet clicking sound, but nothing happens.  He purses his lips.  Interesting.

That’s when the door opens, soundless and sudden, and Matt flinches and recoils.

Two drones stand there, supporting a limp Lance between them.  They toss him unceremoniously onto the floor and the door is closed before Matt can so much as blink.

“Hey.” Matt scrambles across the floor and shakes Lance's shoulder eagerly. “Hey, get up, I have something to show you.”

Lance flinches under his touch and curls up into a smaller ball.  Matt’s excited grin drops. “Lance?”

“M’okay,” Lance says softly, betraying the fact that he’s definitely not.  Matt hovers, stuck between sharing of discovery and comfort and therefore frozen and unable to do either.  After a moment, Lance unrolls himself and sits up slowly, but he keeps his arms wrapped himself and he's shaking ever so slightly.

“Uh,” Matt says eloquently.  “You wanna…?” he trails off, not really sure how to complete the question.

Lance interprets something in Matt’s awkward silence, and he shakes his head.

“Okay.” Matt fidgets.  He flicks the fingers of his numb hand against the plating on his metal shin, and gets distracted by the bizarre sensation of hearing the tapping and feeling the faint vibrations of the impact, but being unable to feel either the fingers or the leg.  He can't help it -- he giggles.

“Matt?” Lance's voice is high and unsteady and drags Matt back to sobriety.  He stops tapping.

“What?”

Lance goes quiet, long enough for Matt to feel himself getting distracted again.  In an effort to pull his focus back together, Matt’s about to make some comment, he has his mouth open and everything, but then Lance sighs bone-deep and says, “Can you just… stop. Stop.”

Matt twitches.  He can’t say that it’ll be okay, or not to worry, or any of the generic, comforting platitudes he remembers from home.  He thinks, for a moment, of his uncle’s funeral, of condolences and expressions of understanding that bubbled up and seethed inside him until he’d had to sneak out of the funeral hall to pace angry circles around the parking lot until Katie had found him and called him an idiot and offered him the puzzle game on her datapad.

Finally, he simply says, “You’re not alone.”

Lance shudders, and his breath hitches alarmingly, but he nods against his knees.  Matt, for his part, is distantly surprised by his own ability to do this, to be present, without retreating or falling into some hole of memory.

*

They don’t talk about it, because Matt’s paranoid.  Though it isn’t really paranoia, is it, when he knows the Galra can hear him and see him despite the utter lack of visible surveillance equipment in the cell.  He has the burns to prove that.  So refusing to discuss the plan isn’t paranoia, it’s self-preservation.  The more they can keep the Galra in the dark, the better.  Luckily, Lance seems to have come up with this idea independently -- that, or he’s too scared, or just an idiot who doesn’t know anything anyway, but Matt has known Lance for… seven sleeping periods of indeterminable length, now.  He’s almost certain that neither of those is the case.  Still, scientist -- he has to consider the possibilities.  

Consider the possibilities considered.

Lance is in Galran isolation for a reason and Matt is counting on that reason.  He’s gonna figure out how to get them out of the cell, and then he needs Lance to step up, as much as it rankles.  Rebels are well and good but unless Lance belongs to them -- Matt tries, desperately, not to let himself hope -- Matt has no idea how to find them.  Contact them.  And with no idea of where his father might be… other than Lance, Mat is functionally alone in the universe.

A little while after the first observational tests, Matt had shown Lance the script on the manacles. Lance’s eyes had lit up, and he’d nodded, once, very slightly.  The sight of it had Matt’s heart racing, jumping fast and hard and he can’t remember feeling this optimistic about anything since his capture, not even when he and his father had drawn up the plans to sabotage the equipment at the mining camp.  Or when he’d first been liberated by the rebels.

Because Matt’s brain is a soup of inconsistency at this point, he pulls a joke from an old movie and says, faux-British accent and all, “Wait to lift the curse until the opportune moment.”  Remarkably, Lance seems to understand the reference, and he cracks up.  Matt giggles with him, but underneath it all, he manages to hold onto one thought -- wait for the moment.  Wait for the right moment.

He doesn’t know what the right moment could consist of, and he prays to every god he’s ever heard of that his mind will be in the right place when it happens.  The thought that a perfect opportunity could come up while Matt is in the middle of a flashback or a breakdown… it’s devastating.  Somewhat counterproductively, just thinking of it sends him into a whirlwind panic attack that takes him far too long to come down from.  He only hopes that Lance will be more on the ball than he is.  And that he won’t be out of the cell, getting who even knows what done to him by the Galran prison guards.

Matt figures that they’ll know the moment when it comes.  They have to.  Otherwise they’re completely screwed.

And come it does, in the form of an abrupt jerking crash that sends them both careening against the wall.  Lance jolts with a hoarse shout of alarm, and Matt has a brief moment to see the panic on his face before the omnipresent Galran lighting just… cuts out.

Matt gasps, adrenaline spiking with terror before his rational mind can kick in and remind him that the dark isn’t something to be afraid of.  And indeed, based on his recent experience, he’d think that light would be the scary thing, but some part of him reverts to a four-year-old as soon as the lights go out and he screams in fear.  After so long in constant, searing brightness, the darkness seems absolute.  There’s a lurching feeling in his gut, and he realizes that either they’ve stopped moving, or they’ve started from a standstill.  Either way, their momentum has changed.

Lance calls his name, and there’s fear in his voice, too, but it’s undercut with excitement.  Matt wonders why, in the part of his mind still capable of wondering, and then it abruptly clicks -- this is it.  It’s time.

Matt feels Lance’s fingers touch his own, and they catch hands and squeeze.

Almost sloppy in his eagerness, Matt bangs the manacle of his numb hand against his prosthetic knee, and immediately the cell is filled with a soft, pink glowing.  He lets out a breath, releasing just a bit of the tension and fear from the blackout.  Anxiety for their impending rebellion threatens to bowl him over, but he compartmentalizes, shoves it down, and tries to focus.  Do or die time.

Lance grabs Matt’s foot, at the ankle, and Matt manages to resist the urge to pull it away.  Lance’s own manacle glows with the contact, and then he moves his hand quickly, so fast that the glowing letters on the manacle have yet to fade, and presses the swirled symbol to Matt’s big toe.

The manacle flashes green, and with a soft beep, it disengages and falls in two pieces on the cell floor

Matt can’t help it.  He laughs, and Lance whoops, and they share a single, exhilarating moment of triumph before the sense of urgency sets back in with a vengeance.  No going back, now.  Lance quickly disengages his other manacle, then helps Matt remove his own.  For some reason, Matt’s leg stays lit up, but he doesn’t question it.  Beyond all probability, luck seems to be on their side.

“The door,” Lance hisses, looking to Matt for guidance.  Matt bites his lip and scoops up one of the half-manacles in his left hand, poking at its innards carefully.  What he finds there makes him throw back his head and cackle hysterically.  Tears stream from his eyes and he wipes them hurriedly on the back on his arm.

“Hold this,” he instructs an alarmed Lance.  “Careful.”  

It’s so simple.  So much like the gravity drill in the mines.  He starts laughing again, even as he pulls out the power source, cracks it open, and rejigs the wiring with only one stinging jolt to the fingers of his dominant hand.  It takes him longer than it should, to rewire two of the manacle halves, rip out the power source on the others, and reconnect them, due to the numbness of his fingers, but this is it.  This is it.  Their moment.  

“Watch,” he instructs, and wrapping his hand around the de-energized part of the manacle, he takes one giant stride towards the wall with the doorway and punches as hard as he can.

The outline of the doorway sizzles into view, sparking, and Matt hits it again, ignoring the painful vibrations up his arm and down his leg.  Lance, catching on quick as ever, joins him in the assault, and soon enough, the door cracks open and crumbles.

Mat stands in front of the now-opened door, utterly frozen.  He had so many ideas, half-thought plans, of what they could do once they’d gotten out of the cell, but he can’t think of them.  His entire brain is just white noise  Somewhere, dimly, he recognizes the beginnings of panic, but he’s utterly unable to do anything to stave it off.  He can’t move.

And then -- “C’mon, man, let’s go!  I’ve been in Galra ships before.  You know, a coupla times.  I can get us out.  Let’s go, I can get us out!”

Lance.  “Lance?” Matt can’t think how to form the words, can’t figure out what he needs but it’s something, he needs something and he needs Lance to know but he can’t say it, and --  
  
“You’re not alone,” Lance’s voice says, and then Matt feels a hand, warm, on his shoulder, and he gulps and nods and lets Lance take hold of his tingling hand and pull him out into the hallway.


	7. Chapter 7

Everything around them is utter pandemonium.  There are red lights flashing and alarms blaring, and a line of drones stamps past them towards some urgent destination that clearly has nothing to do with them, because they squash themselves against the wall and they’re completely ignored despite Matt’s loud hyperventilation.

“Not part of their program, I guess,” Lance mutters, sounding almost _offended_ by the idea.  Then, “Well, that’ll make this easy.”  He pounces on the last drone to pass, zapping it with the modified manacle.  It goes down immediately, crumpling in a heap.  Lance grabs its blaster, and hefts its weight in one hand with a confident grin.  “Oh yeah,” he says, “now this is more my speed.  Here,” he adds, passing the manacle off to Matt.  Matt blinks.  It all happened so quickly that he hasn’t moved a muscle since Lance attacked.  The sound of the Galran drones’ footsteps recedes down the hallway.

“That’s…” Matt trails off uselessly, completely speechless.  Which doesn’t happen often, he might add, but who would have known that the lanky kid was some kind of combat expert.  

Lance jerks his head.  “C’mon.  We gotta find a pod or something.”

“Holy shit,” Matt finally manages, which is as good a summary as anything.

They creep down the hallway, hampered by Matt’s leg, which is doing something strange and isn’t quite responding the way he expects it to.  And unfortunately, because he has no tactile input from the thing, he doesn’t realize that his leg isn’t where his brain thinks it is until he commits his body weight and goes crashing against the wall.

“Lean on me,” Lance demands, arm out and open, but Matt grits his teeth.  He wants to escape this place under his own power, dammit.

“I got it,” he snaps, and putting his trademark Holt stubbornness to good use, a few stumbling steps later and he’s figured out how to more-or-less compensate for the lag.  It’s difficult, though, to adjust his gait, and it takes all of his scanty concentration just to stay on two feet and follow Lance down the hall.

They come to some kind of hub. There are multiple hallways and rooms branching off of the circular junction, and Matt nearly crashes into Lance when he stops abruptly to consider their options.  Matt’s panting and sweating, finding even their limping run to be strenuous after so long in a tiny cell, muscles atrophying and breaking down to fuel the rest of his body, and he leans against the wall to catch his breath while Lance chews on his lip and considers their options.  

“That one,” he decides, pointing at an open doorway.  

It’s some kind of communications room, Matt thinks.  There are video feeds displayed on overlapping screens and arranged in a broad semicircle around a trio of chairs that seem to have been hastily abandoned, if the skewed angles are anything to go by. Matt squints, but he can’t make much out.  Several show empty rooms, he thinks, and a few others show drones marching through dust and debris.  There are a few on the exterior of the ship, and Matt blinks when he sees a spout of what almost looks like _fire,_ of all things, across the screen of one, and then a glimpse of yellow plating that appears to crash into the ship -- the way the ship shudders under their feet and the screen in question immediately goes to static seem to confirm that assumption.

Lance’s face is eerie in the light from the screens.  His eyes are wide open and nearly manic in their excitement, and his teeth are bared in a violent grin.  “ _Yesss,_ ” he hisses.  “Voltron’s here.”

“Voltron?”  Matt snorts.  He’s heard of Voltron; it’s a myth.  A fairy tale.  He wonders, with a flash of alarm, if Lance has just as few marbles left as he himself does, rattled around and out of his head with the concussion.  If Lance is half-insane, too, they might be in big trouble.  Matt edges closer again to full-on panic, and only wills himself away with great difficulty.  

Lance leans even closer to the screens, angled perilously over one of the chairs.  “It’s real,” he says simply.  Then he blinks, and looks over at Matt with an expression so full of relief that Matt instinctively relaxes.  “We’re gonna be okay.  We’re really gonna get out of here.”

That’s the exact moment their spate of good luck comes crashing down, in an almost literal sense.  The ship jerks and shudders again, and several large pieces of plating fall down from the deck above.  Matt stumbles back, trips over his bum leg, and falls heavily.  He shields his face and head, shaking, and he feels an impact against his prosthetic, and the jarring in his stump.  When the shaking stops, he realizes that his leg has been pinned under a heavy sheet of metal and what seems to be some kind of computer port, all smashed up and unresponsive.  An experimental tug tells him his leg is stuck, and he’s about to start trying to work it free when the ringing in his ears clears out and he hears the sound of laser blasters.  He cringes, pressing himself against the floor.  

Drones.  They must have fallen in from the floor above, he realizes, and they’re shooting.  Now that he’s focusing, he can feel their heavy steps on the floor, and the blasters spark in the corner of his eye.  He wonders why they haven’t shot him yet.  After a moment, he chances a glance up, propping himself up on his elbows and craning his neck, be he doesn’t see anything other than broken bits of tech and the ship’s skeleton.

“Lance?” he calls, suddenly fearful.  There’s a sound of commotion from the lowered section of the room, near the holographic projectors that power the screens.  Definitely the crux of the drone action, he thinks.  Lance must be down there.  As if to confirm, he hears a terrifyingly familiar shout of pain.

“Lance!” he yells again, and his minds scrambles for a solution until he feels his ankle joint catch on the computer port.  Stuck leg.  Right.  Get it free.  Start from there.  One step at a time -- he giggles at the pun and repeats it out loud to himself, distracted. 

It’s a good thing that the leg isn’t flesh and bone, he thinks, because otherwise it’d be crushed and he’d have no hope whatsoever.  As it it, the leg doesn’t really… _do_ much, even when it is working properly, but at least it doesn’t hurt.  He gives another futile tug, and swears loudly when nothing happens.  He swears again, and starts wriggling and thrashing, reason gone completely out the window with a creeping sense of claustrophobia, and he thinks he must have blacked out for a second or two or more, because he abruptly realizes that the leg is free and he’s still on the floor. 

He can still hear the sounds of combat, from below, but it’s mostly been reduced to blaster noise and an occasional wordless yell.  The leg is sparking and even less responsive than before, but Matt scoops up his manacle tasers and limps over to where a railing used to separate the upper control deck from the projector space and peers over the edge.  

Directly below him are two drones, crouching behind an overturned projector and shooting steadily at a mangled heap of steel near the far wall.  From his aerial vantage point, Matt can see the top of Lance’s head, and one of his shoulders.  The pilfered blaster rests in a dent in his makeshift foxhole, but he’s not shooting.  Why isn’t he shooting?  Matt squints, worried and confused.  Then he remembers Lance yelling, and he gulps down a sob of fear.  He can’t shoot.  Something is wrong and he can’t.  So Matt has to… do something. 

He looks down at the Galra sentries below him, and immediately starts laughing.  It’s the only solution, really.  So simple.  And so very stupid.  He wipes his eyes.  “Mufasa time,” he announces to nobody, and then with a jerky movement he flings himself over the edge.


	8. Chapter 8

He screams hoarsely for half a second, completely unable to help himself even though he has a plan, he does, and at this point he’s so far beyond terrified he doesn’t feel it anymore.  It’s a scream of exhilaration more than anything else. 

He comes down hard on the first sentry and they crash to the ground together.  Matt feels the sharp edges of the drone’s armour pierce into his flesh leg and side, but he’s riding the craziest adrenaline high he’s ever had and the pain is nothing more than a brief prickle.  He jams one of the manacle tasers into the drone’s armpit, where the joint wiring is exposed, and in one flailing motion he twists and punches the second drone in the groin with the manacle in his other hand.  All three of them slump to the floor in a twitching tangle, and the sudden cessation of movement makes Matt’s head spin.  He lies there panting for a moment, unable to hear anything but his own harsh breathing and the ringing in his ears.  

“I can’t believe I just did that,” he mutters to himself, and breaks into breathless giggles.  He pictures throwing himself out into space and just floating, floating forever in the total black silence of space.  Floating past Kerberos and spinning around the orbit of Pluto.  Spinning, and spinning, and…

The ship shudders under his pile of broken drones, and he jolts and falls in a heap on the floor.  He groans at the throbbing up what’s left of his legs, and the wetness pooling in the crook of his elbow.  “Ouch,” he says, and he sits up gingerly.  Should bandage that, he thinks woozily, but there's really nothing to do it with, so he resigns himself to the warm drip down his arm and looks around.

Opposite him, he sees Lance peeking over his barricade.  He’s too far away to see in any detail, but Lance looks pale and sallow under his dark skin.  Matt flashes him a wobbly thumbs up.  He shoves himself up but immediately falls flat on his face again and he has to resort to crawling the few feet over to Lance.

“Well that was fun,” he says with manic cheerfulness.  “Where to next, oh intrepid tour guide?”  He arranges his mangled legs under him so that he can sit up without tipping over and gives Lance a sarcastic salute.

“I… I’m not…” Lance’s voice wavers, and his eyes are bleary and unfocused.  Matt belatedly connects the dots; this, combined with his slumped posture and the fact that he hadn’t been actively defending himself and hadn’t come out from his hidey-hole when Matt took down the drones… He sees the trickle of blood under Lance’s hair, dribbling down his neck, from the same place as the previous head injury.  Matt feels another spike of fear.

“You’re hurt,” he says abruptly, leaning forward and reaching.  Lance grits his teeth and nods, and Matt follows the line of his body down to where his arms are wrapped protectively around his bare stomach.  The smell of burnt flesh is heavy and familiar in Matt’s nose.  He looks down at his own hands.  The skin around his wrists is charred and swollen, but the manacles are off.  They buzz faintly in his hands.

“That’s not me,” he says out loud, and Lance makes a soft, questioning noise.  Matt shakes his head and inches forward.  “Let me see.”

“No.”

Matt clicks his tongue.  “Let me _see_ , Lance.”  Now that he’s looking, he can see scattered burns and scrapes across Lance’s skin, fresh ones, and he winces in sympathy.  Some of the burns look bad.  His stomach flips at the idea of what Lance might be hiding under his hands but he swallows it down.  He puts on his best Commander Holt imitation and demands, “Show me.”

Lance twitches and he lifts his head.  He blinks blearily.  “Where’s Shiro?”

Matt freezes.  “What?”  

“...Pidge?”

Pidge again.  Matt shakes his head and reaches for Lance’s arms.  “No.  No, I’m not Pidge, and I’m not… not Shiro.  It’s me.”

Lance slumps, and his hands fall away with a quiet, despondent, “Oh.”

Matt sees an explosion in the mines.  One of the drills explodes underground, and the shockwave causes cave-ins all around the epicentre.  Matt had been carrying a crate full of some kind of pseudo-organic, pulsating ore with his father -- luckily not in any of the tunnels, but they’re knocked off their feet nonetheless, the crate falling with a heavy crack, straight onto Matt’s foot.  The metal one, luckily, so he’s able to scramble back to his feet in time to see the last of the fireball dissipating in the atmosphere.  His dad grabs his arm and without having to speak they both run for the source.  And then they’re in an ashy crater, surrounded by debris and screaming, and Matt sees a quadruped alien stumble by with a smouldering crater in its back, and another with six arms and a froglike mouth open in a silent scream, standing completely immobile with an inch-wide hole through its chest, charred and smoking around the edges, and then his dad touches his knee with a cold hand and says, “Matt, Matt, come back, I need you.”

“What?” he gasps, and chokes on the ash in the air, pulverized stone and bone, and he gags, and he shuts his eyes tight.

“Please,” Lance begs, and when Matt opens his eyes again he’s back in the Galra ship.  

“Sorry,” he gasps.  “Sorry, sorry, I’m here, that, uh, that’s -- that’s bad.”  Lance’s only answer is a wordless whimper.  “You can’t walk,” Matt says, parsing the situation out loud, trying to focus on the present.  “I can’t walk.  We’re… Are we stuck?  I don’t know what to do.”

He feels himself start shaking and floating off, but Lance taps his knee and brings him back.

“Okay,” Matt says, babbles, he’s babbling, and he scooches closer to Lance, his hands fluttering anxiously as he tries to find the appropriate angle to maneuver from.  “Okay, so, we’re here, right, and, and we’re not going anywhere just yet, not unless I can th-think of a way out of here, ‘cause you just had to go and get yourself shot, you idiot, and I had to go and mangle my other leg, because I’m an idiot, too, and holy fuck we’re completely screwed, aren’t we?”

Lance doesn’t respond, and Matt shakes him a little until he groans and opens his eyes.  “Don’t get too comfy, kiddo, you gotta stay alert.”  He doesn’t remember, exactly, why he needs Lance awake -- it isn’t his turn to sleep, is it, there’s something he needs to be awake for.  He adjusts his hold, instinctively holding him closer.  Lance’s head lolls against his shoulder and he mumbles something.

“What?”

“Not kiddo,” Lance mumbles again.  Matt presses his cheek into Lance’s hair.

“Yeah?  What are you then, kiddo?”

“Intergalactic space badass.”

Matt’s startled into a laugh, a genuine one, not like the broken hysterics he’s gotten perversely used to, and the feeble joke nonetheless calms him down, quiets the white noise in his head.  He takes a deep breath, then another, and again.  Okay.  Plan.  He needs a plan.  He cradles Lance’s head against his neck, feeling for his breathing.  It’s shallow and uneven and Matt can feel heat radiating from the charred hole through his abdomen.  He needs a plan significantly faster.  But for all his purported genius… he can’t think of anything.  They just have to sit and wait and Matt wonders darkly if the Galra will find them before Lance dies.  

His hands shake.  There’s no way he’s letting the Galra take him again.  He can’t do it.  Not again.  He eyes the modified manacle with a critical eye.  He knows exactly how much damage the things can do, and he thinks that, if applied to a particularly sensitive place, directly above the heart or in the back of the throat, as close to the brain as he can get…

“I’m not going back to that cell,” he announces.  Lance makes a noise of assent, and Matt kisses him somewhat awkwardly on the hair.  Then he activates the manacle, and it crackles to life.  He stares at the tiny arcs of static across the electrified surface.

“Wha…” Lance mumbles, lifting his head an inch or two.

“Sorry, space badass, I --”

“Shh!”  Lance shushes him, bleary urgency in his voice, and Matt can tell he’s concentrating hard on something from the way his nose scrunches up.

“Lance?”

“Shh!  Listen.”  Flabbergasted, Matt does so, but all he hears is blaster fire.  It sounds closer, and his heart jumps into his mouth.  He’s scared.  He needs a way out.  They don’t have a way out.

Then Lance laughs, once, a painful sound full of inexplicable relief, and his eyes brighten with tears.  “Hunk…” he whispers.  And then he tries to yell, “Hunk!  Hunk!” but his voice is weak and raspy and what comes out is nothing more than a quiet croak.  He winces in pain, and a few tears escape to trickle down his cheeks.  “Hunk,” he rasps again.  “Matt… Hunk…”

Oh.  Right.  Matt briefly considers his options, but he’s already as good as dead, so what does he have to lose?  He ruffles Lance’s hair in an attempt to soothe him, carefully avoiding the injury, and then he yells as loud as he can.  “Hunk!  Hunk hunk hunk!”  It’s not the first time that Matt has yelled something that sounds completely looney, not even close, but -- he sounds like a complete looney.  He imagines some romance novel cover hunk sweeping shirtless through the door, all long hair and rippling muscle, and he snorts and cracks up. “Hunk!” he yells again in between giggles -- but this time, someone answers.

“Hello?” he hears from somewhere outside the door, and there’s a brief pause in the blaster noises before they redouble.  “Lance?” the mysterious voice calls, and Matt’s heart leaps.

“Here!” he screams, voice cracking.  They might make it out of here.  Someone’s here for Lance.  They might make it.  They might.  His entire body shakes and the knuckles of his numb hand creak around the manacle.  “Here!  We’re in here!”

There’s a crash, and he hears Lance’s name yelled again, and Lance looks up, too weak to move much but leaning ever so slightly towards the door in anticipation.

“Lance?” the voice calls, and he sounds so much closer, he’s in the room with them, he must be, just on the level above, and Matt freezes up.

“Hunk,” Lance rasps, and then Matt hears a gasp and someone in white and yellow armour leans over the edge and sees them.  Matt doesn’t know how to react, but Lance whimpers and reaches out.  The newcomer -- Hunk, what a ridiculous name, Matt thinks randomly, the rest of his mind caught up in wordless panic -- Hunk leaps down and the giant two-handed cannon in his hands just _disappears_ , what the hell, and he practically sprints the few steps to where Matt and Lance sit in their feeble shelter.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early update this week since I won't have computer access through Friday. Enjoy!

Matt tenses reflexively at this new person’s approach, and he clenches his makeshift taser, wild and determined to fight off the threat -- only this isn’t a treat, is it, and Lance is shaking, body loose with relief.  Hunk skids to a stop in front of them.   

“Oh, buddy,” Hunk breathes, and he leans right into Matt’s personal space to wrap his arms around Lance.  Lance’s hands scrabble on the smooth armour, and his breath comes in painful gulps.  “Shh.  I got you now, it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay.”  

Matt feels a prickle of irritation at this stranger, completely irrational and possessive and he fights hard to shove it down, compartmentalize.  “He’s hurt,” he says shortly, and Hunk blinks at him, startled, like he hadn’t even realized Matt was there, despite the fact that their faces are less than a foot apart.  Matt sets his jaw and wills himself to stay present.  “He needs help,” Matt insists, meeting Hunk’s eyes and holding the gaze.  He tilts his chin up in a challenge, even as a small, reasonable voice in the back of his head screams that he’s being an idiot, that he shouldn’t antagonize the one possibility he has for survival, for _escape_.  Luckily, Hunk seems to have better control over unhelpful emotions than Matt does.  Or he just doesn’t see a naked, emaciated, crippled nerd as a threat.  Which, rude.  But Hunk just nods, looks him over with an expression that Matt can’t read.  Something like pity, and curiosity, and fear.  

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him,” Hunk says, and he looks down at Lance with such familiar affection that Matt is almost reassured.  “You’re gonna be fine,” he says to Lance in a soothing tone.  “We’ll get you in a cryo-pod and you’ll be good as new in no time, okay?  Don’t worry.”  He starts to pull Lance into his arms, which would be fine except that means taking him out of Matt’s.

Matt struggles, his grip weak, and he flashes with fear over the idea of being separated.  No.  “No,” he gasps.  “No, he’s mine, you can’t have him, I need to… I need to…”  He holds as tight as he can, but a drone pulls Shiro away, and Katie screams from somewhere near but far, too far, and Matt has to hold on, he needs to hold onto Shiro because Shiro’s screaming, too, and --

Lance taps his fingers against Matt’s metal leg.  The sound is faint but familiar and Matt stills, flicking his eyes over to meet Lance’s.  The screams fade away and he wonders if they were ever there in the first place.  Lance quirks his lips in an attempt at a bloodless smile and says, “S’okay.  He’s safe.  Trust.”  Matt works his jaw, but he nods a little reluctantly, still caught up in the hallucination, trying to figure out what’s real.  While Matt focuses on his breathing, counting the breaths, he hears Lance and Hunk talking quietly.

“Lance, is that…?”

“Yeah.  Doesn’t know.  Don’t tell.”

“But --”

“Wanna s-see…”  Lance’s voice trails off, and Matt can hear him gasping.  Matt doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but he thinks it’s about him, and he wonders if he’s still there, if they’re talking about him because he’s gone somewhere else, but he doesn’t know where.  He doesn’t know where he is.  He curls the unresponsive fingers of his left hand and scratches at his palm and doesn’t stop even when he feels blood running warm and sticky down his hand.

Lance rasps his name and Matt jumps.  “Focus,” Lance says.

Matt shakes his head like a dog, trying to stop the spinning, floating feeling.  “I don’t know where I am,” he says, and his voice sounds strange in his own ears.  

“Matt,” Shiro says, and Matt cringes with his hands over his ears.

“Matt.”

“Matthew.”

“Cadet Holt.”

“Matt!”

There are so many people screaming at him, he hears Shiro and his parents and Katie and Iverson and Kerberos mission control and his instructors and Lance and the aliens in the mines and his friends from university and it’s loud, it’s so loud, and they’re calling for help, accusing him, they need something from him and it all swirls together with the train track scream of a tornado.

“No,” he whimpers, curling up.  “No, leave me alone, I, I don’t know, what -- I can’t… go away.  Leave me alone!”  

“What’s wrong with him?” his father says, face looming and then disappearing behind Matt’s eyelids.  

“Needs help,” Iverson answers, a sneer in his voice, his single eye glittering with anger, and Matt feels small and vulnerable.

And then he hears Shiro, far away, sees his eyes dark with worry.  “Matt, come back.”  Matt’s leg hurts.  Shiro reaches for him and lifts him up, throwing Matt over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, and Matt bounces and then he’s lifting off of Kerberos, pulled into the tractor beam of a purple ship, immobile, and the pressure, there’s so much _pressure_ …

The last thing he hears, before he blacks out, is an unfamiliar voice saying, incomprehensibly, “Guys, I’ve got him, he’s in bad shape, gotta get back to the castle and get him in a pod, cover yellow.”

* 

Matt’s bouncing.  Every bounce jolts against his stomach, and it hurts.  He starts counting the bounces but he only makes it to seven before his stomach clenches and he dry heaves, scrabbling at the smooth armour of whoever is carrying him.  He can’t figure out the pattern of breaths, but there’s more than one other person there, he thinks, and everyone’s breathing fast, so fast, harsh, and his own heartbeat stutters and jumps in response.  He retches again.

“Whoa!  Hey!  You okay?”

“Shiro?”

For a moment, Matt doesn’t hear anything but the slap of feet and the heavy, panting breaths.  He starts counting.  “No,” the voice finally answers.  “No, I’m Hunk.  Lance’s friend.  Remember?”

Lance.  That’s right.  “Where is he?”  Matt gasps.  “Where --!”

“I’ve got him!”  Hunk says hurriedly.  “I’ve got him, he’s right here, okay?  Gonna get you both somewhere safe, I promise.”  After a moment, he adds, “Guy I found with Lance, I’m bringing him back to the castle.  Explain later.  Running now.”

“What?”  Matt asks, flabbergasted.  Galra purple lights bounce with him, reflecting off the floor, and Matt thinks they’re still in a Galra ship.  Running, yes, Hunk is running, and Matt’s head is spinning and he can’t really tell, but they’re moving, they’re going somewhere, and this is Lance’s friend.  Lance’s friend who promised they’d be safe.  Matt wonders what being safe is, he can’t remember it.

“Talking to my team,” Hunk responds, and Matt has to take a moment to try to remember the question.  “Hey, listen, you think you can walk?  There’s only so much I can do if we run into the Galra when I’m trying to carry you both, you know?”  

“I…” Matt’s legs hurt, but his legs always hurt.  He remembers something about wanting to get out under his own power.  What a load of crap.  He didn’t know he had any bravado left.  “Yes.  Yeah.  Put me down.”

Hunk pauses to let Matt roll off his shoulder and he rotates the arm with a grateful sigh.  Matt immediately falls all the way to the ground, smacking his chin sharply on the floor.  He grunts, and above him Hunk lets out a dismayed squeak.

“I’m okay,” he insists, pushing himself up again.  His flesh leg screams protest, cut up and bruised from his flying tackle of the Galra drone, but when Matt shoves that particular pain aside, the leg is in perfect working order.  It hurts, and his muscles shake with the simple exertion of bearing his own weight, but he can do it.  He can.  The other leg is a bit more difficult, still not responding to the signals his brain tries to send it -- not like Matt knows how that works, anyway -- and while it supports him well enough when he gets the knee to lock, he can’t make it move and the knee bends when he takes the weight off his flesh foot, sending him crashing to the ground again.

“Wait, wait,” he says stubbornly, ignoring Hunk’s nervous rambling and the way he keeps looking anxiously down the hallway.  “I can do it.  I can fix this.  Just… just gimme…” Matt wracks his brain, trying his best to _think_ , to solve the problem.  The leg won’t move.  It’s basically a dead weight.  Except -- it can support him, he realizes, like a crutch.  He just needs the crutch to be rigid.  A splint, then, something to keep the leg straight.  The deck is littered with debris, from an earlier explosion no doubt caused by Hunk and whoever his team is, coming to rescue Lance, and Matt can’t let him down, he needs Lance to be safe.  He needs himself to be safe.  They need to get out.  He feels himself edging into panic.  “No no,” he mutters to himself.  “Focus.  Breathe.  Solve the problem.  Patience yields focus.”  He takes a deep breath and looks around again.  Nothing to splint the knee with, but then he realizes -- it’s not a flesh and bone leg.  No need to treat it like flesh and bone.  And once he remembers that, the solution becomes clear.  It’s easy enough to find a shard of metal, vaguely triangular in shape with a wide, flared base, and without further ado he extends his leg, twists his body, and jams the shard firmly into the back of the knee joint, pressing it in until the edges catch.

“What are you doing!?” Hunk yelps.

Matt ignores him and pushes himself back to his feet.  His knee folds a bit when he leans on it, and there’s a grating, scraping vibration that he feels in the bone of his stump leg.  He grits his teeth against the new kind of pain, but it’s undercut with a vicious sense of victory.  The plates of his leg catch on the metal shard and his leg stays almost entirely straight.  He swings it out and takes an experimental step.  The joint holds.  He starts laughing, doubling over.  “Space pirate,” he gasps between bouts of laughter.  “Peg leg.  Arrr.”

Hunk stares at him with his mouth dropped open and Lance sliding backwards off his shoulder.  He blinks, closing his mouth with a click and hefting Lance back up.  “Oookay.  Uh.  L-let’s go, then?”

Matt nods, the laughter petering off.  “Lead on, big guy.”

He certainly can’t move quickly, but Matt makes a game effort, hop-skipping his way along after Hunk.  Now that Hunk has a free arm, he’s able to re-materialize the giant handheld cannon (and Matt is _so_ going to have to figure out how that works later), which comes in useful when a quartet of Galra drones appear in front of them and Hunk’s able to take three of them down with a single shot.  Matt takes the last out with a giddy whoop and a stab of his manacle taser.  Somewhere along the way he’d lost the other, but he’s glad to at least have the one.  He feels safer with it.  He laughs at the idea that something that has caused him so much damage has now become some kind of perverse security blanket.  Man, his life is so messed up.

“Nice one,” Hunk comments, and Matt is startled out of his laughter.  He realizes his body is shaking and he holds onto the manacle with both hands.  He nods.

“Almost there,” Hunk adds, and Matt doesn’t let himself believe it, firmly tries to squash down the bubble of hope because he knows that if they lose their chance now… he’s not going to be able to take it.  

“No more marbles,” he mutters to himself, and just shakes his head when Hunk shoots him a questioning look.

Miraculously, they don’t run into any more Galra, biological or drones, and Matt squawks in disbelief when Hunk leads them to a hole in the ship plugged with a _giant metal lion face_.  “What the fuck!” he squeaks, more a statement than a question, and he repeats himself louder when the mouth opens and sticks its tongue out and Hunk runs up it without breaking stride, straight into the gaping maw.

“Hurry!” he calls back to Matt, the sound echoing strangely.  “I need you to take Lance!”

This isn’t the weirdest hallucination Matt’s ever had, but it’s pretty far up there.  He hears the sound of Galra blasters behind him, somewhere in the ship, and between imaginary giant cats and the Galra, he knows which one he’d rather take a chance on.  No contest.  He limps up the tongue and the jaws close around him.

He finds himself in the cockpit of a spaceship, because of course, why wouldn’t there be a spaceship inside a giant lion robot.  Hunk is strapped into the single control chair and busily flipping switches and tapping on screens and… other things.  He gestures without looking at Matt and says, “Hold onto him, I don’t have a, a bed or anything and he’s not doing so good, I need you to look after him until we get back to the castle.”

Sure.  The spaceship inside the robot lion is going to take them to a castle and when they get there everything will be magically fixed.  Matt doesn’t even have it in him to question anything anymore, everything today has been so far beyond the scope of his experience or expectations that he can feel himself shutting down, too overwhelmed to do anything but follow what he’s told.  He limps and hops his way around Hunk’s center console to where Lance has been laid out gently on the floor, next to a wall.

The spaceship tilts beneath him, and Matt loses his already tenuous balance and goes crashing down, only narrowly avoiding landing in Lance’s lap.  Hunk yells an apology but Lance doesn’t react at all, which is far more worrisome.

“There’s a first aid kit in the panel above you,” Hunk calls, along with several instructions on what to do with it, but Matt’s taken a hundred first aid courses, so he doesn’t listen.  He can figure it out.

The ragged hole in Lance’s abdomen has stopped smoking, and at least the heat of the laser blaster cauterized the wound almost immediately, so he isn’t at risk of bleeding to death.  But his entire body is cold and pale, and his heartbeat is quick and thready.  First things first.  Matt finds a foil blanket in the panel beside the first aid kit, and he unfurls it and tucks it carefully around Lance with shaky hands, pulling his feet into his lap.  He pulls down the first aid kit proper, already going through lists of treatment options, muttering under his breath, and he flips the lid open and --

He freezes.  He doesn’t recognize half of the items in the kit, and things that look familiar, bandages and capsules and the like, are all labelled in an unfamiliar script.  It’s not English, not any Earth alphabet, as far as he can tell, even though Hunk is human… seems to be human… might be human.  The script bears a frightening resemblance to Galran writing, less spiked in its construction, but the resemblance is indisputable.  “What…” Matt whispers, unable to speak any louder.  He’s starting to hyperventilate and he gasps for air but can’t get it, and his chest gets tight and his head spins and he has to try to hold it in place with his hands, afraid that if he doesn’t he’s going to shatter, explode.  “What is this…” he gasps.

He realizes he can hear Hunk speaking, but he can’t make out the words and he wonders what language it is, if he hasn’t been speaking English this whole time, if the Galra translation algorithms have just been making him think that -- usually there’s an uncomfortable sort of humming sound behind any of the translations but maybe he just didn’t hear it, maybe he’s imagined it, maybe he’s imagining the whole thing, and the thought that he’s still back in that cell, in the purple strobing lights, makes him scream.  He can’t see Lance, any more, and he can’t hear anything but his own screaming.  He blinks, and the world flashes purple around him, and he curls up with his hands over his head and screams until his throat gives in, and even then, he can’t stop.  His throat hurts and the ripping sandpaper sound is grating, but he can’t stop.

There’s no way he’s going to survive this.  He can’t.  Not again.


	10. Chapter 10

Somebody grabs Matt’s shoulders and he tries to twist away, scrabbling and sobbing in fear.  Somebody is yelling, and the voice sounds familiar, vaguely familiar, it’s not Lance but it makes him think of Lance and it’s like a sledgehammer hit to the chest when he realizes that Lance might not be real, either, and he goes abruptly limp. 

“Is he okay?” he hears, the voice unfamiliar but he can hear the words, understand them, and he shudders.

“I don’t know.”  That one he recognizes, the one from before, but it’s different, it sounds… wet.  

“Get him into the castle, we should pop him in a cryo-pod too, I may not know much about you humans but this one looks rather awful, poor thing.”

“Lance?”

“Already in, that was a nasty wound he took but he should be fine in about three quintents, give or take a few ticks.”  Someone sighs and sniffles.

“Lance…?” Matt mumbles.

The voices stop, and he feels prickling on the back of his neck, like he’s being watched.  He scrunches up his shoulders against the feeling, and he flops his head weakly to the side to blink up out of one bleary eye.

Hunk leans further down over him, big hands steady on Matt’s shoulders.  “Hey, man.  You in there?”  He rubs gently with his thumbs and the sensation is so pleasant and unexpected that Matt makes a hoarse sound of surprise.  The massage stops and he feels its absence keenly, but he’s too wary and confused to ask for more.  

“I’m here,” he whispers.  “Where’s Lance?  Is he real?”  He tries not to let himself hope, thinks over and over, don’t fall back in, don’t believe, it’ll hurt later.  It’ll hurt.  No matter what happens now, he’s going to hurt.  

Hunk sniffs again and nods.  “Yeah.  Yeah, he’s real.  He’s in a healing pod, he’s gonna be okay.  He’s asleep.  Do, uh, do you want to see him?”

Matt nods and starts to push himself up.  His arms shake and he almost falls flat on his face, but then Hunk scoops him up like a baby, and when Matt’s head stops whirling he realizes he’s curled up and being carried bridal-style.  The other voice says something, some kind of suggestion, but Matt can’t make it out.  Hunk’s armour is smooth and warm and he clutches at it and hums “Here Comes The Bride” under his breath.  “Invisible dress,” he mutters to himself, and giggles.  He thinks that this should probably be degrading, but he’s naked and crazy so who cares, right?  And besides, Hunk’s hands are huge, he could probably fit them around Matt’s waist, no problem, and Matt is completely distracted contemplating the size of his fingers as they walk to… somewhere.

Hunk keeps up a steady stream of nervous chatter all the way, and Matt tries to listen to some of it, but he has only so much mental energy and it’s far too scattered for him to gain any real benefit.  He does hear something about Voltron again, and the cryo-pods.  He forces his focus when Hunk mentions Lance, and anxiety spikes his heart again.  

“Where is he?”  Matt interrupts, and Hunk takes it entirely in stride, even though Matt feels like he’s asked this question before.  Hell, he’s so mixed up.  Can’t think straight, can’t see straight, can’t focus on anything for longer than a few breaths.  He times his breathing with Hunk’s, and that helps, a little, but he still feels like the universe is moving too quickly around him, like he can’t keep up no matter what he does, and it’s scary.  

He hears words in his mind -- but as a memory, this time, he can tell, it’s not a hallucination, he knows where he is.  Or, where he thinks he is, at any rate.  “Focus in on one point,” he says to himself.  “If it’s too big, break it down.  Focus in on one point.”  

“Where’d you hear that?”  Hunk’s voice breaks into his thoughts, and Matt squints and frowns.  “Sorry,” Hunk offers, but he’s still looking at Matt expectantly, and Matt searches for the answer.

“My dad,” he says finally.  “Used to tell me and Katie.  When we were stuck.”  

“...Katie?”

Matt sighs and he doesn’t know what Hunk is looking for so he doesn’t answer.  Katie’s not the focal point he needs right now, anyway.  He hurts, everywhere, in his legs and his head, and he digs for that familiar pinprick of pain in his left palm. “Is this real?” he asks.

“Yeah.  Yeah, this is real.  You’re real, and Lance is real, and you’re both gonna be okay now.”

Matt digs his nail harder in.  “I don’t believe you,” he admits.  

Hunk pauses, and his hold shifts so it’s more like a hug than anything else, and Matt doesn’t know what to do with that.  “I know,” he says, and his voice is sad.  He’s silent for some time after that, and Matt almost falls asleep, rocking in Hunk’s arms.  He hurts, and the light is bright, but it’s a soft, soothing blue, not Galra purple, and that, more than anything else, is what makes him finally start to feel just a little bit secure.  Maybe they really did get out.  Maybe they did… but Lance isn’t here, and that’s important.  That feels important.

“Where’s Lance?” he asks again, but this time Hunk’s answer is shorter.

“Here,” he answers simply, and Matt twists in his arms to look.  Lance is standing upright, but his eyes are closed, and he’s completely encased in a glass tube.  There’s a console screen covered in status bars and blinking lights and scrolling reports, but Matt barely spares them a glance.  Lance looks… he looks tired.  And cold.

“What… what’s going on?  What is that?  Lance?”  He tries to squirm out of Hunk’s arms, but he’s strong, and Matt really isn’t, and Hunk has no problem keeping a hold on him.

“Cryo-pod. Cryogenic healing pod.  They accelerate healing somehow, I, I don't really know how they work, but they do, they totally do, it's like.  Space magic.”

Hunk sets him carefully down on his own two -- one -- feet, foot, _whatever_ , but keeps his big hands around Matt’s waist and under his arm to hold him up.  Matt really isn't supporting any of his own weight but Hunk doesn't seem to mind, and Matt appreciates the illusion of control, if nothing else.  He's never been one to depend much on anyone and in his moments of lucidity -- the lack of his own autonomy rankles.  It's a nice gesture, if nothing else.  Matt can appreciate a gesture.

With Hunk holding him up, Matt inspects the cryo-pod the best his current faculties allow -- which, even he can admit, isn't much.  He pointedly ignores the control panel, with its unfamiliar alphabet, and focuses on the machine itself.  “Test it on Captain Solo,” he says to himself, a little uneasy despite the fact that Lance doesn't seem to be in any discomfort.  His face is pinched but he seems calm.  Relaxed.  Matt hasn't seen him look relaxed like this.  He presses his hand to the glass.  

Hunk groans and Matt twitches away, leaving a smear of blood.  “Seriously?  Lance never shuts up about those old movies.  I can’t believe there are two of you now.” Matt grins, and he leans his forehead against the pod.  He’s as close as he can get, but Lance is too far away.  Too far.  He twitches in Hunk’s arms.

“What now?” Matt asks softly.  “How long before…” he trails off, but Hunk picks up on his chain of thought.

“A few days, Coran says, so he should be done about the same time you get out.”

Matt nods, then freezes.  “What?" 

No.  No.  He’s not going in there.  He just escaped from a tiny cell -- barely, he doesn’t know if he even escaped at all, really, because reality hasn’t exactly been a strong point for him lately.  But either way, in this… this timeline, or hallucination, or _whatever,_  Matt is not getting into a cryo-pod, and he says as much, albeit with more colourful language.

Hunk sighs and tightens his grip on Matt’s shoulders.  It’s starting to feel confining, rather than reassuring, and now Matt is angry.  “I’m not -- not _yours_ ,” he spits, twisting away and pressing up defensively against Lance’s pod.  “I’m not going in there.”  The glass is cold under his fingertips and it twinges uncomfortably.  

“It’ll help,” Hunk insists, hands stretched out.  His voice is pleading and a little nervous.  Nobody has been afraid of Matt in a long time.  It feeds into his righteous indignation and he feels stronger for it.  Still wobbly on his feet, but he’s adamant that he’s not going to get into any kind of pod.  Not now, not ever, now that he’s gotten out he’s never going back in.

There’s a troubled expression on Hunk’s face, and he pinches his lips tight together.  “Aw man.  You’re never going to trust me again,” he sighs.  More to himself than to Matt, but Matt hears him anyway and he tenses, one hand pressed to the pod for balance, the other outstretched in front of him in as aggressive a pose as he can manage.  He’d left his manacle in the… the space lion… cockpit… thing.  So he’s empty-handed, fuzzy-headed, and even with his hazy sense of perception he can tell he must look all sorts of pathetic, but that doesn’t matter.  Protecting himself -- and Lance -- is his number one priority.  

“Come at me,” he says, injecting as much cocky arrogance into the syllables as he can.  Bluff, intimidate, make them think twice.

Hunk does.  And the next thing Matt knows, he’s being bundled up and shoved kicking and screaming into a pod, and then everything gets so, so cold.


	11. Chapter 11

“Easy there, Matty,” his dad says.  He’s hovering and anxious and it’s starting to drive Matt bonkers.  He opens his mouth to tell him to back off a little, but then his leg abruptly gives way.  He shouts in a combination of surprise and pain, but his dad swoops in and catches him around the waist before he can fall.

“Ow, ouch, shit.”  Matt and his dad work together to lever him back to his feet, where Matt perches unsteadily on his remaining skin-and-bones leg.  He wobbles, but his dad’s hand is firm around his upper arm and he doesn’t fall.  “It _hurts_ ,” Matt complains. 

“Of course it does,” his dad answers, rolling his eyes at his son’s dramatics.  “It’s only been about two weeks.  Give it time.  It’s surprising you can put any weight on it at all, really, even with the latest Galaxy Health Corps tech it usually takes --” 

“At least a month for rehab, I _know_.”  And he does, really -- he’d even helped with some of the design for their most recent prosthetics, because even if it isn’t his primary field, biotech is cool, okay, and he has a few friends in the department who are great at what they do, but they’re just not quite on his level.  So Matt knows, better than most, exactly the kind of care and construction that should go into amputation and the fitting of a prosthetic.  He’s aware of how rapidly his stump has healed. Or _been_ healed, anyway, by some outside force or galactic medication or whatever, because it’s only been two weeks and even if he can’t see the actual stump itself, buried as it is under the metal cuff of the leg, the visible skin and scar tissue indicate a much older injury.  It doesn’t escape him, though, that the healing has progressed just far enough that he can stand on it, sort of, but no further.  He’s here to work, of course.  He’s a tool.  Can’t have damaged tools, but no sense spending more resources on them than necessary. All about efficiency. 

“Ready to try again?” his dad asks, in the tone Matt remembers from trying to learn how to ride a bicycle and solve differential equations and pass the Far Solar Exploration physical fitness test.  He grits his teeth and nods.  

“Yeah,” he says, even though his legs are shaking and hurting and he has a phantom ache in his foot that he recognizes for what it is even if he can’t do anything about it, and he’s sweating and tired.  But he absolutely refuses to let any of that slow him down.  He let Shiro die for him, and if Shiro could walk off to his death, standing tall and straight like the soldier he always was, Matt can walk with a fake damn leg.  He takes a deep breath, holding his father’s hand so tightly the tendons in his wrist pop, and he takes one, then two, then ten slow steps forward before he falls again.  It’s the best he’s done, so far, one end of the cell clear to the other, and it’s a small victory but he’ll take what he can get.  One of the aliens in their shared holding cell starts making a _chirr_ ing sound, and the others join in.  Standing ovation, Matt thinks, breathless after his minuscule feat of strength.  Still, he grins and flips himself so as to be seated more comfortably against the wall.

“Excellent!  Well done, kiddo.”  His dad sits down beside him, ruffles his hair, and pulls him into a one-armed hug.  “I’m proud of you,” he says in a quieter voice, and the other occupants of the cell politely pretend they can’t hear.

Matt leans into him and soaks up the affection.  They’ve always been a close family, especially him and his dad, the two boys, but things change when you’re abducted and enslaved by aliens.  He takes every scrap of familiarity and comfort that he can find and returns it where he can, with jokes and casual touches and stories to tell Mom and Katie when they get home.  Matt refuses to entertain the possibility that they won’t get home.  He can’t think about that.

“Lucky you,” he jokes, “you get to see your kid learn to walk twice.”

Neither of them laughs. It's not funny.

*

Matt hears the hydraulic hiss before he feels or sees anything else.  Then, feeling.  He's cold, desperately so, and he wonders why he didn't notice before now.  The pressure changes quickly enough to make his ears pop, and he opens his eyes as he tips forward, too sluggish to react to catch himself.

He's just resigned himself to the fact that he's going to fall flat on his face, when he realizes that somebody's caught him.  He's not falling, anymore, and he's surrounded by something soft and warm.  A blanket.  Somebody's holding him in a blanket.  

“Dad?” he mumbles, disoriented, as he snuggles into the unfamiliar softness of the blanket.

“Naw, but I can be your daddy if you want.”

“Oh my _god_ , Lance, I can't believe you said that.  That actually came out of your mouth.  Wow.  I can't believe we're friends.  You know what?  No.  No, we're not friends anymore, I rescind the friendship contract.”

The voices are familiar, Matt thinks, and he squints around himself, trying to place them.  He blinks, and a face resolves itself just above his, grinning and sparkly-eyed. Blue eyes.  He knows those blue eyes.  Lance winks at him.

He feels his own eyes widen, and then he’s scrabbling at the blanket, trying to twist it so that his arms are free.  Lance yelps in surprise, and starts saying, “Hey, whoa, what --”  He cuts off abruptly when Matt takes the arm he’s managed to work free and shoves it up Lance’s shirt.  Off to the side, someone -- Hunk, right? -- makes a choking noise. 

“Uh,” Lance says.  

Matt’s fingertips feather over a round, puckered scar at Lance’s abdomen and he sags, relieved of a tension he barely knew was there.  “You’re okay?” he asks, just to make sure, because the evidence of his own senses really doesn’t count for much anymore, these days.

Lance blinks.  “Oh.  Yeah.  Yeah, I’m fine, the pod fixed me right up, no problemo.”

“No problem?”  Hunk splutters.  “You nearly died, man.  In my _arms_.  I’m traumatized.  I, I mean, look how bad it scarred, you were right on the edge there.”

“Not helping, Hunk,” Lance says pointedly, but Matt ignores them both, touching the scar again, eyes flickering up to check for any swelling just behind his hairline. Lance, for his part, clearly doesn’t mind at all, and why would he?  They’d spent a good chunk of time together naked and scared, and when you’re naked and scared together there’s not a whole lot that’s off-limits.  Matt doesn’t know how to express the relief at seeing Lance up and whole and _alive_ , nor the confusion and wariness and still-tentative hope he feels about being here, wherever this is.  It all mashes together and wells up and chokes him, and he clutches the soft blanket at his throat with his numb hand. 

Only -- it isn’t numb anymore.  Still tingly, sure, but it’s responsive and he can feel the subtle texture of the blanket with two fingers and a thumb, which is a marked improvement.  He looks at his wrist.  There’s a broad scar there, similar to the one on Lance’s body, encircling his wrist and feathering up his hand and down his forearm. The skin is tough and unyielding, but it doesn’t _hurt_.  “Some tech,” he mutters, flipping his hand to look at his palm.  He freezes.

Lance immediately grabs his hand, covering Matt’s bare palm with his own.  “It’s okay, it’s fine,” he says in a low, urgent voice.  “Don’t freak out, okay?  I know that’s, like, your thing, but it was just a little cut, the pod healed it all up.  This is real.  I promise it’s real, okay?” 

“I’m not freaking out,” Matt says.  It’s… almost true.  He’s well on his way, but not quite there yet, and he’s fighting it.  And he’s going to win, dammit, there's too much happening here -- hallucination or not, he’s still a little unclear on that point -- for him to waste his time with another panic attack.  “I’m not freaking out.”

Lance looks at him carefully.  “You really aren’t, huh?  Good.  That’s…” He squeezes Matt’s hand, then adds, “You look way better, man.  How do you feel?”

How _does_ he feel?  Matt takes a mental step back, and takes inventory of himself.  Head is still a little achy, but it’s not the throbbing, persistent pain he’d gotten used to. This feels more like when he’d sequester himself with his holocomputer for hours and forget to have anything to drink.  The combo eye-strain-plus-dehydration headaches were always uncomfortable but it’s familiar, and he can deal with it.  He moves his head a little, side-to-side, and finds the stiffness in his neck and the bumps on the side of his skull are gone.  The bruises and cuts all up and down his body are gone, and when he looks, only the largest of the cuts on his legs and foot from his suicide leap onto the Galra drones have left a scar visible through the dried blood.  Most miraculous, and he can’t stop touching the rings of scar tissue, now that he _can_ , are the deep burns around his wrists.  They don’t hurt.  He shakes his hands just because he can and laughs when there’s no biting pain.  In fact, apart from the headache and vague general soreness, almost nothing hurts at all.  Just his leg, what’s left of it, right where it joins the metal.  It tingles like a burn.  And Matt has a lot of experience with burns, now. 

“Oh.  Cryo.  Of course,” he mutters to himself.  He balances with Lance’s outstretched hand and clumsily lifts his metal leg, still jammed straight.  He winces when the action pulls on the skin of his stump, which is white and cold to the touch.  It hurts.  And it’s not an insignificant pain.  Matt clenches his hand, scraping at his palm as he tries to convince himself that ripping the prosthetic out from the root won’t solve the problem.

Hunk steps forward, and Matt instinctively shies away from him.  Hunk’s face falls a little, but he holds up a towel.  “I thought that might be a problem,” he says, and he doesn’t come any closer.  Matt gets the distinct impression that Hunk is treating him the same way he would a skittish animal.  To be fair, though, Matt also feels rather like a skittish animal, and while he kind of hates it it’s not really within the scope of his control, right now, so he tries not to think about it.  He forces himself not to flinch when he reaches for the towel.  It’s warm and damp, to Matt’s happy surprise, and he manages to give Hunk a genuine smile as he wraps it awkwardly around the top of his metal leg and tucks the end in.

“Should help,” Hunk says, just as awkward as he rubs the back of his head.

“Yeah,” Matt murmurs.  “Good thinking.”

“Ooh, for frostbite, right?”  Lance chimes in, looking like he can’t decide whether to be pleased at Hunk’s idea or annoyed that he didn’t think of it himself.  Evidently, he decides on pleased, because he adds, “Nice one, big guy,” and offers his fist for Hunk to bump, which Hunk does with the appropriate solemnity.  Lance grins, wide, and throws his arm around Matt’s shoulders in a way that manages to be both casual and supportive.  Matt, ever the weirdo, surreptitiously sniffs at his shoulder.  He smells good.  Clean.  Matt can’t remember the last time that he was clean.  Or had proper clothes -- where in space did Lance manage to find _jeans_?

A thought occurs to Matt, and he gasps, his entire body going rigid.  Lance makes a worried sound, but before he can say anything, Matt hurriedly asks, “Could I take a shower?”

“What?”  Matt can practically see the gears spinning, as Lance tries to shift focus from concern to bathing, and it would be funny if he wasn’t so focused on the idea of being clean, like, right now.  “Um, yeah, sure?  Yeah.  Yeah, we can --”

A new voice interrupts from across the room.  “Hey, how are things going with Lance’s friend?”


	12. Chapter 12

Matt is struggling to bench press a moderately-weighted bar, and it’s reached the point where he’s almost concerned about it falling on his face, but he has a physical to pass, dammit, and he will not be defeated by the laws of gravity and electromagnetically-weighted steel bars.  “Because this is just so relevant,” he mutters under his breath, in between slightly louder curses and gasps.  “Up in space, where there’s gravity, and I’m going to be needing to lift heavy things _aaall_ the time, it totally makes sense for me to be -- fuck!”  His arms give out, the traitorous noodles, and the bar comes crashing down -- except it doesn’t.

“Careful,” Shiro says, eyes glinting with amusement as he replaces the bar on the rack.  One-handed.  Bastard.  “Don’t want to squish that giant head of yours.”

Matt sticks his tongue out, because he’s an adult, and accepts Shiro’s offer of a hand to pull him back into a sitting position.  “I think you meant my giant brain,” he retorts, wiping his face on a towel.

Shiro taps his chin with mock thoughtfulness.  “No.  No, I definitely meant your head.  Your big, big head.”  He laughs and jumps back when Matt snaps his thigh with the towel.  

“Yeah, well, not all of us can dedicate all of our caloric intake to cultivating biceps the size of basketballs.  I have a very important organ inside my big head and it requires a lot of energy to keep it performing.  Not that you’d know about that, of course.”

Shiro mimes blowing up a balloon.  “Wow, I think I just saw it get bigger,” he quips.

Matt cracks a grin and snaps him with the towel again.  Shiro tackles him off the bench and Matt hits the rubber floor with an undignified yelp, and no matter how much he struggles he can’t squirm free.  Shiro crouches over him, shoving him down by his shoulders and with his feet hooked around Matt’s knees, rendering Matt completely immobile.  

“Get off me, you meathead!” Matt yells, even as he laughs at how pathetic he is.  

“All brain, no brawn,” Shiro teases.  “Take care of your father.” 

“What?”  Matt suddenly feels cold, the ground beneath his hands rough and unyielding.  His leg hurts, sudden and sharp, and he cries out.  “What?”

“Matt?” 

“Where…?”  Matt’s voice is distant, in his own ears, and he tries to follow it.  Flashback, he tells himself.  Find the present.  Get grounded.  Break it down, focus in on one point. 

Lance answers him, and his voice is easier to follow.  Matt latches onto it, using it like a rope to pull and claw his way back into himself, back into whatever his reality is. “You’re safe.  We’re okay, remember?  We’re fine.  We’re on the castle ship, we were gonna go have a shower, right?” 

“Right,” Matt gasps, and shakes his head to clear out the sound of bloodthirsty cheering.  “Right, yeah.  S-sorry.  Just, give me a sec, I thought…”  He looks up.

Someone blurry stands frozen in the doorway to the room.  He’s far enough away that Matt can’t really see him, but something about the silhouette, the body language…

“I thought you said he was… was on Earth,” Matt whispers, and he barely even manages that, his heart’s beating so hard.

Lance shrugs, and his head bobs from side to side.  “Weeell,” he drawls, “he _was_ on Earth… you know, briefly...”

“Matt?” Shiro says again, complete disbelief in his voice.  Matt feels Lance look sharply at Hunk, and sees Hunk shrug helplessly out of the corner of his eye.  

“Hey, beefcake,” Matt jokes feebly.  “They didn’t tell me you were gonna be here, too.  Small universe, huh?”

Shiro doesn’t say anything in response, but Matt thinks he nods.  He wishes for his glasses.  Or, at least, that Shiro would come closer, because not being able to see him properly is fuelling the many paranoid thoughts that keep dancing around the back of his mind and he knows that if this half-reunion continues the way it’s going, Matt’s going to end up screaming again.

“Lance, Hunk,” Shiro says, in his clipped soldier-voice.  Matt’s heart leaps clear into his mouth and stays there.  “Explain,” he orders.

Lance’s hand is warm around Matt’s shoulder.  “Uh, surprise?”

Shiro’s answer is a dry, “No kidding.”

“Shiro,” Matt interrupts.  He rolls the name around on his tongue, and it fits like it belongs there.  “Shiro.  Get your p-pretty little butt over here.”

“That’s really you?” Shiro asks as he walks over.  Matt can appreciate the confusion.  Oh, he can definitely understand that.  He’s busy trying to reassure himself of the same thing.  But he just nods, because there isn’t much more he can really do.  Lance squeezes his shoulder and then steps away.

“I… I’m sorry,” Shiro says.  

“What? No, shut up, don’t be stupid.”  Matt presses his face into Shiro’s chest, twisting handfuls of his shirt in his fists, and tries not to fall over because that would just ruin the whole thing.  Shiro is big, and warm, just like he’s supposed to be, and when he wraps his arms around Matt and his blanket, it’s all Matt can do to keep from just… melting.

“Thought you were dead,” he confesses to Shiro’s shirt.  “For me.”

Shiro’s arms tighten around him. “Sorry.”

Matt slaps his chest and Shiro pulls back a bit in surprise.  “Don't you dare,” Matt says fiercely.  “Don't you dare apologize for saving my life, you idiot.  I'm the one who should be sorry, right?  So you just… shush,” he finishes lamely.

Shiro chuckles wetly and presses his cheek briefly to Matt’s head before pulling back.  “Sure,” he says in the tone that Matt knows means he's just humouring him.  That's going to be a problem, but he'll take it up later -- and the idea that he has any kind of reliable future, that he can actually plan for later, is an exciting revelation.

Shiro’s close enough, now, that Matt can finally see him.  “Oh,” he says involuntarily, then, softer, “what did they do to you?”  He reaches without thinking to trace his thumb over the dark, broad scar across Shiro’s face.  He doesn't register Lance’s noise of alarm, at first, but as close as he is, he can't help but feel it the moment Shiro’s breathing hitches and shudders.

“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t pull away.  “You don’t have to answer that.  Rhetorical question.  Ish.”  

“It’s fine,” Shiro responds, in a tone that says it really isn’t.  

“Yeah, okay, sure.”  Matt moves his hand up to the goofy tuft of hair that Shiro refuses to cut like the rest.  Some things never change, he thinks, and he runs his fingers through Shiro’s bangs with a frankly ridiculous degree of fondness.  They were black the last time Matt saw him, though.  He guesses this isn’t the result of some kind of space bleach incident.  “Someone needs to melt your frozen heart, huh, princess?”

He hears Hunk and Lance make choked, confused noises, but Shiro just swats Matt’s hand away and groans.  “Oh my god.  I can’t believe I forgot about the ancient Disney thing.  I’m going to regret ever missing you, aren’t I?”

Matt grins.  “Let it go, Shiro.”

He hears Lance say, “Oh!” and then immediately launch into the song in question, and Matt grins wider.  Shiro makes a sound that’s halfway between a grumble and a laugh, but he squeezes Matt tighter.

“I don’t know how this happened but I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says in a raw whisper.  

Matt pats his back, but his filter has always been pretty perforated and the whole extended period in alien captivity has worn it down to almost nothing.  So he doesn’t think before he says, “Yeah, well, ‘okay’ is a relative term, but I haven’t kicked it yet, so hey, that’s a win.”

He immediately regrets his flippant response when Shiro looks like someone’s punched him in the stomach, and swiftly tries to backpedal.  “No, I, it’s fine, it’s fine, don’t worry, I’m, I’m mostly in one piece, and who needs a, a, uh, two legs anyway, right, and like, hey, y-you’ve got an arm, wow, that wasn’t there before, that’s… that’s… we match, or something, um, shit, this isn’t… hey!  Hey, Lance, you said something about a shower, right, let’s go.  Right now, immediately.”

Without looking up, Matt pulls out of Shiro’s slack grip, ignoring the ringing in his ears, and he trips and nearly goes sprawling when he forgets he can’t bend his knee, but Lance catches him under the arms.  And let it never be said that Matt is one of those noble, stalwart types who doesn’t run away from his problems.  Because that’s exactly what he does -- he corrals as much of his anxious energy as he can and he limp-runs out of the room, still holding on so Lance has no choice but to follow him.

“Hey, hey, calm down,” Lance says when they're clear and Matt has slowed down because he can't catch his breath and realizes he has no idea where he is.  Matt gives him a look, because when the hell has _calm down_ ever been good advice, but Lance doesn't back down, so Matt takes an exaggerated deep breath.  Lance rolls his eyes. “Seriously, dude,” he continues, lips twisting unhappily, “what was that?  Did you see Shiro’s face?  He --”

“Shut up.  I want… I want a shower.”  The thing is, Matt knows he's not reacting rationally.  He saw.  He knows.  He might not be the most tactful guy to ever come out of Galaxy Garrison but he can tell when he's doing something that would make his dad sigh in that disappointed way he does.  

He thinks that he's going to have to apologize to Shiro later, and they'll have to actually have A Talk, and the thought makes his stomach boil with nausea.

Wait.

He claps his hand over his mouth and Lance's eyes go wide.  He jumps at the wall and slams some kind of hidden panel and squawks, “waste disposal, waste disposal!”  A chute appears in the wall just in time -- Matt doesn't stop to think about the mechanics of such a thing, fascinating though they must be, and he leans into the chute and gags.  Nothing comes up but a slimy, acrid trickle of bile, but he dry heaves for a few extra moments after that.

“Ugh,” he moans, eyes squeezed shut.  Lance rubs his back.

When they’re both sure that Matt’s stomach isn’t going to try to purge itself again, Lance hauls him back upright with a, “C’mon, let’s go get you that shower, I don’t think you realize how gross you actually are right now, the prisoner-hobo look is so not good on you and you smell like a sushi dumpster.”

It’s hilariously insensitive and exactly what Matt needs.  He snorts with laughter and ignores the residual acid taste in his mouth until Lance stops in front of an indistinguishable door in a hallway of identical-looking doors.  Matt is completely turned around at this point but he’s also spending most of his effort on not falling over, so it’s not like he’s paying a whole lot of attention to his surroundings at this exact moment.  They’re not purple, and that’s good enough.

“Those pod thingies,” Matt says.  “How do they work?”

Lance shrugs and unhelpfully answers, “I have no clue, you’re better off asking Coran sometime.  Only, make sure you have a looot of time.  Dude can _talk_.”  His tone is fondly exasperated and completely devoid of self-awareness and it makes Matt giggle again.  

Lance glances at him like he’s wondering what the joke is, which makes Matt laugh harder, and when no answer is forthcoming he huffs, “What are you, the Joker?” and pushes the door open.  

It’s a barracks-style bathroom, and would be completely unremarkable except for the fact that it’s in _space_ and Matt hasn’t seen a bathroom of any style in ages.  Since they were captured on Kerberos, the fanciest he’s had was a trough in a side-tunnel down a mineshaft.  Granted, the troughs were lined with some kind of irradiating filter, which he’d assumed was sort of like an ultraviolet sterilizer, though it hadn't looked anything like the Earth version when he’d surreptitiously taken it apart one day. But fancy space sterilizer or not, it was still a trough.  And squatting over a trough with a newly amputated leg is not fun.  He’d fallen ass-first into the goop on more than one occasion.

“There,” Lance says, pointing at a large, partitioned stall.  “Shower.”

Shower.   _Shower._  When was the last time he had a shower?  Before Kerberos, even.  They didn’t have a shower onboard their little craft on the mission.  But this one has running water and soap and shampoo.  He’s going to be _clean_.  Matt takes a deep, steadying breath and drops the blanket in his haste to get under the shower -- and then he freezes.

The shower stall is clean and white and nothing like a cell.  “Not a cell,” he says to himself, out loud, to reaffirm it.  “Not a cell.”

It’s awfully small and closed-in, though.

Matt grits his teeth in frustration, so tight his jaw hurts.  He can’t move.  Can’t walk away from this, but he can’t make himself take the two steps that will put him in between the walls.  Trapped.

He hears, faintly, a rustle of fabric and the hiss of a zipper, but he doesn’t think about it until Lance brushes past him.  Matt jumps, startled out of his own head (and _dammit_ , he’d thought he was here this time), and watches as he turns on the shower and stands in the spray.  And waits.  He doesn’t look at Matt, but after a moment, he shifts, just a little, opening up a space under the spray of water and extending an arm in a way that could almost be coincidental.  

“I’m such a weenie,” Matt mutters, and he reaches for Lance’s hand.

The water hits him, warm and gentle, and he swears and nearly jumps out of his skin.  Lance grips his hand.  “You okay?”

Matt is okay.  He’s so okay.  He hasn’t been this okay in a long time.  He nods helplessly, and then his flesh leg gives out and he sinks to the floor, still under the spray, and lets the water wash over him, pooling in his ears and weighing down his hair and running into his mouth and nose and out again.  The warm water feels so good on his aching stump, driving out the last of the cold, and turning the patches of unscarred skin a warm, healthy-looking pink.  He thinks that he’s never going to move from this place ever again.

He hears a quiet pop and a squishing sound, and then he feels hands in his hair.  He startles at the touch, and it pauses, but then Lance starts working through again. Matt’s eyes close, and he listens to the rhythmic sluicing of the water and the soapy scratching sounds around his head.  The scent of something clean and vaguely floral hits his nose, and it’s not familiar at all but he assumes it must be shampoo.  Space shampoo.  

“Oh,” Matt says softly, involuntarily, and he moans in a way that’s almost obscene.  He hasn’t felt anything this good in… a while.

“Keep it in your pants, buddy,” Lance jokes.  He rolls Matt’s head between his hands, fingers massaging behind his ears and at the back of his neck.

“Don’t have any pants,”  Matt says.  Lance’s hands still for a moment, but when Matt whines in protest he starts again, chattering away.

“You don’t, do you?  Huh.  I wonder if we can find some of the old Altean clothes that’ll fit you.”  Lance snickers suddenly.  “Or we can steal Keith’s pants.  You’re like the same height, we can probably get you a belt or something until you stop looking like a skeleton.  Oh man, that’d be priceless.  We’re definitely doing that.  As soon as he goes up to train with the gladiator or whatever I’m stealing his pants.”

“Keith?”  The name is familiar, and it take Matt a moment to sort through his memories -- the ones that are available to him, anyway -- and figure out why.  “Shiro’s Keith?”

“Oh yeah!”  Lance’s voice gets loud and bright.  “You gotta know what their deal is, right?  C’mon, tell me.  I’ve been dying to know.”

What Matt remembers is piecey at best, a sullen little kid following Shiro around like a puppy and Shiro talking about him on the flight to Kerberos with a soft, fond look in his eyes.  Matt doesn’t think he ever really met the kid, not properly at least -- they were definitely in the same room at some point or another, definitely at the pre-launch, but he can’t remember them ever speaking.  Not like what he remembers really counts for a whole lot, these days.  Still.  He feels like it was some sort of familial thing, or something close to, and he’s backwardly glad that Shiro has a piece of his family.

Matt refuses to think about how he’s lost his.

“How many of you are there, uh, here?”  Matt asks.  He goes through the people he’s met, since waking up.  Lance, obviously, and Hunk.  Shiro.  Keith, apparently.  Someone called Coran.

Lance taps out numbers on Matt’s head.  “Seven, not counting you.  Me, obviously, I’m the best one --”

“Obviously.”

“-- and Shiro and Hunk, who you saw already, and Keith and, um, Pidge.  We’re the paladins of Voltron, I don’t like to brag but we’re kind of a big deal.”  Matt snorts, and Lance tugs on a lock of hair.  “And then Allura and Coran are Alteans, Allura’s a princess, she’s totally into me, and Coran is basically our entire support squad.”

Matt waits for the rest, because from what he’s seen of the spaceship so far, it must be huge.  Even Galra ships and operations usually have at least ten to twenty grunts and officers in addition to the drones.  “...That’s it?” he asks finally.

“Mm.”  

“But…”  Matt struggles for words and he waves his hands around vaguely, finally settling lamely on, “but that doesn’t make sense.  How does that even… what?”

Lance plops down on the shower floor behind Matt, wrapping around him like an octopus.  “Oh _man_.  Have I got a story for you.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And finally.

Being warm and clean makes Matt feel almost human again.  The bizarre, flowy Altean clothing a little less so, but at least he has clothes again, which is something.  And they’re in a calm, soothing green, which Matt appreciates for the fact that it’s not purple, because he’s developed a complex just like he’d predicted, though he still doesn’t understand why Lance had been so gleefully insistent on the green.  Not that he really cares.

According to Lance, it is now close enough to castle breakfast time that they should head towards the kitchen, after taking probably the longest shower that the universe has ever known.  Actually, Matt is going to find the data on that one.  For science.  They take their time, by necessity rather than choice, Matt’s leg still seized up and barely functional.  It’s frustrating, but Lance promises that Hunk and the mysterious Pidge are tech wizards and “will get that thing fixed up for ya lickety-split.”

To which Matt responds, “Did we just go back in time four hundred years?  You did not just use the phrase ‘lickety split’,” which sets off a round of easy discussion on old expressions and how old is too old.  

When they finally make it to the designated kitchen space, though, Matt clams up again, abruptly nervous.  They’re greeted by Hunk saying, “Hey glad to see you didn’t drown yourself,” and Matt makes awkward eye contact with Shiro, who gives him the most pained smile Matt has ever seen.  Crouched protectively beside Shiro is a vaguely familiar boy that Matt assumes must be Keith, glowering in a way that makes the hair on the back of Matt’s neck stand up.

“Are you trying to burn a hole in him or what?” Lance quips, brushing past Keith to sprawl against the counter, leaving Matt alone by the door.  He shifts unconsciously to put his back to a wall as Keith unpins him to scowl at Lance instead.  

“So that’s Pidge’s --”

“Anyway!” Lance bursts out, blatantly interrupting Keith and making Matt jump.  “Where is the little tech gremlin, anyway?”

Shiro sighs and rubs his metal hand over his face.  Matt tries and fails not to stare at it, but nobody seems to notice.  Shiro’s arm is covered in a tight black shirt -- because, he’s Shiro -- and Matt wonders how much of it is Galran.  The hand, at least, seems way more detailed than Matt’s leg.  No fair.

It’s a testament to how fucked up his life has become that he doesn’t even realize the ridiculousness of that train of thought until much later.

“She’s probably still in her lab,” Shiro says, long-suffering, to a general murmur of assent, though Matt doesn’t miss the narrow-eyed look Keith gives Lance and he prickles in defensive instinct.

Hunk raises a finger.  “Yeah, she’s definitely not in her room, I checked on the way down, I bet she passed out on top of her tech pad again or something.”

“What were you going into her room for?” Keith’s voice is half-suspicious, half-incredulous.

“Well, I wanted to try to st --  _ borrow _ the blueprints she ripped from the Galra ship, I know she has them on a data crystal somewhere…”

Matt lets the conversation wash around him, focusing less on the words and more on the tone.  He thinks back to the last time he was in a kitchen like this, surrounded by bickering but unequivocally friendly voices.  He remembers Katie banging her foot as she made her sleepy way into the kitchen for a pre-launch breakfast feast, and her grumbling until she saw the veritable mountain of chocolate chip pancakes and her face lit up like a Christmas tree, and they’d fought over who got the freshest ones or the ones with the most chocolate, him playing the going-to-space-for-a-year card, and Katie countering with being younger and still a growing child who needed hearty sustenance.  Until their dad had swooped in, already dressed in his uniform, and snagged half of the mountain of pancakes from right between their noses, unwittingly causing them to band together in a united front against him.  He remembers that they both love chocolate chip pancakes, but he can’t for the life of him remember what a chocolate chip pancake tastes like, and it sours what is otherwise a happy memory.

He tunes back into the conversation with a jolt when Lance nudges his arm.  “Well?”

“What?”

Lance leans right into his space, going so far that he actually has to tilt his head to look up at Matt and Matt almost goes cross-eyed trying to maintain eye contact. “Wanna come get Pidge with me?”  His eyes are unusually bright and his entire body is thrumming with some kind of energy that puts Matt on edge.  

Hunching his shoulders up for protection, Matt rubs at his hand and says, “No?”

“Awh!  C’mon!  It’ll be fun, I promise!”  But Lance doesn’t give him any time to actually refuse -- before he’s finished speaking, he has an arm around Matt’s waist and is half-carrying him down another hallway.  For some reason, the rest of the group follows, talking among themselves in whispers.  Matt feels very much like he’s being watched, observed, and if he didn’t need a solid grip on Lance’s shoulder to keep from falling over, at the speed they’re going on his stupid broken leg, he’d been digging a new hole in his hand.  He breathes, and focuses on the lights and the happy whooshing of Lance’s breathing.  Not purple.

“-- bad idea,” he hears someone mutter, and a whispered, “you know Lance” in reply.  None of that serves to make him feel more secure, somehow.

They come through a door that opens up into a huge, wide space, bigger than any Matt’s been in since the mines, and he balks in the doorway.  “Big,” he manages to answer, when Shiro puts a questioning hand on his shoulder.

Shiro’s lip quirks.  “You should see mine,” he says dryly.

Matt doesn’t understand, but it doesn’t really matter.  He stares up at the giant mechanical cat, perched with its head high like some kind of green sphinx.  Its claws --  _ claws _ \-- are the size of Matt’s entire body.  The thing is huge.  Matt glances out of the corner of his eye at Hunk.  He’d pretty much decided that the giant yellow lion from their escape was a hallucination; now he has to reevaluate that conclusion.  Lance told him about the Voltron lions, and he’d heard superstitious whispers from other prisoners in the mines, but he’d assumed that the phrasing was metaphorical.  Apparently not.

Lance is grinning broadly at the expression on Matt’s face.  “Pretty cool, right?  Of course, Blue’s a lot bigger, and way cooler -- like, ice cold, baby!  But all of the lions are pretty sweet, check out the shield on Green, now that’s sharp.”

Matt makes a sound that he intends to convey agreement, but he’s a little busy gawking to put his heart into it.  So this thing is a ship.  A space ship.  Which definitely makes more sense than it being any other kind of ship, because the feline design does not appear to be even remotely aerodynamic, but in space, nobody can hear you screaming about fluid dynamics, so he figures it doesn’t matter too much.  Their shuttle for the Kerberos mission was more typically fusiform, but that was mostly to streamline atmospheric escape, not their actual space travel.  But he also wonders how many people it takes to pilot such a large ship, even if Lance had mentioned that there are only seven of them in total.  Seven doesn’t seem like enough.  Hell, even Shiro had sometimes needed help with their shuttle, and there had barely been enough room for the three of them onboard, never mind the entire city that could probably fit inside this thing.  His mind fills with numbers and assumptions and he itches for the blueprints.

He’s so absorbed in looking up at the lion that for several long moments he neglects to look down.  Specifically to the side of its right paw, where Hunk is in the process of crouching over a vaguely humanoid lump.  The enigmatic Pidge, he assumes.  He doesn’t quite know if he wants to meet this Pidge, after everything he’s heard.  She sounds like a prickly nerd and he’s already a prickly nerd.  It’s a niche he’s never liked sharing.

“There can only be one,” he doesn’t realize he says out loud until Shiro says, “What?”

Matt shakes his head at the same time that Hunk reaches down to shake Pidge.

“Go ‘way,” Katie grumbles, in her grouchy, sleep-heavy voice, and Matt blinks and scratches at his hand with no small measure of alarm.  He’d thought he was here.  Present.  Everything feels real, but he hears Katie’s voice again and he grits his teeth and shakes his head like a dog, as if that will shake the hallucinations away.  

“Matt.”  That one’s Shiro, but he doesn’t know if it’s the real Shiro, the current one, or if it’s something his memory has dragged up.  He feels a hand on his back and Shiro’s voice says, “Matt, are you okay?”

He digs his nails into his palm until blood drips onto the floor.  “Yeah.  Yeah.  Just.  Hallucinations.  Hold on a sec.”

And it’s not going  _ away _ , he can still hear Katie’s voice, mumbled and indistinct, and Hunk’s overlapping it.  This is different, the hallucinations don’t usually interact with reality like that, unless this whole thing’s been fake, and he hates that every time he starts to feel just a little bit comfortable it all crashes around his ears and down his throat and he loses the thread again.

Finally, he can’t help it.  He reacts.  “Katie?” he calls out, knowing he won’t get an answer and hoping anyway.

“What?” she says back, voice gravelly and grouchy with sleep-deprivation.

Matt freezes.  It feels like the entire world freezes.

Across the hangar, Pidge sits up suddenly, and she’s blurry, but Matt sees her rub at her eyes under a frightfully messy shock of brown hair.  It’s familiar, horrifyingly, achingly familiar.  He can’t move.

“Matt?” she asks, high and uncertain.  Hunk mutters something, Matt can’t hear it, and then Pidge is rocketing to her feet and charging across the room.  She trips over an unlaced shoe and somehow manages to step out of it even as she runs in some kind of ridiculously athletic feat.

“Matt!” Katie -- Pidge? -- Katie yells again, and then she hits him.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for being late, folks, I was out of town with no internet access. Hopefully the upcoming chapter will make up for the wait!

Matt’s balance is still tenuous at best, and so when Katie collides with him he doesn’t have a chance in hell -- he topples over and hits the ground hard, driving the air out of both of them.  Katie clings to him like an octopus and he wraps his arms around her, too, because goddammit even if this is just a hallucination, it’s _Katie_.

Katie is babbling something and Matt has so many questions, he so confused, but he clings to Katie and can't say anything past the nervous, choking block in his throat. Legs rise like trees around him and there's a canopy of sound, voices, but they blur together.  He doesn’t know which of it is actually happening.  He doesn’t know.

Somebody grabs his hand and pulls it off of Katie's back.  He fights, but briefly, before he recognizes the timbre of Lance’s voice and focuses on the words.

“It's real,” Lance says again, and this time Matt hears him.

Katie unwraps herself enough to roll off of him and sit up, though she immediately presses in against his leg and leans over him.  She's close enough now that Matt can actually see her and he drinks the sight of her in.  He never really expected to see her again, he realizes, no matter how much he tried.  He can’t think.

“Of course it's real,” she's saying.  “I mean I've had this dream before but usually it goes a bit differently and -- oh, that wasn't meant for me, huh, but I'm actually a little offended that you think you'd imagine me falling asleep on the floor and tripping over my own shoe -- well, okay, I guess there is a precedent for that, but c’mon, really?”

While she's talking, Matt manages to catch his breath and lever himself into a sitting position, propped up with one hand on the floor.  He reaches for Katie again and she tucks easily against him.  So much has happened, Lance and Shiro and now _Katie_ and he has so many questions, about how long it’s been, what she’s doing here, where _here_ even is, relative to anything he’s ever known.  And with so many important questions running around in his head, the one that comes out is, “Why do you look like me?"

He hears Lance snicker.  Katie digs a finger into his ribs, and he jumps a little bit more than the familiar gesture should warrant.  “I’m looking _for_ you.”

“Oh.” Matt thinks about that for a second -- or tries, anyway, but it’s hard around all the buzzing questions and the familiar feeling of mental overstimulation.  “Looks like I found you first,” he jokes feebly.

Katie’s eyes narrow.  “How _did_ you get here?”  She looks up at Shiro, who holds out his hands.

“Wasn’t me,” he says, and there’s an undercurrent of amusement as well as… something else, to his words, that makes Matt squint at him.  He’s not quite sure what that was but it seems almost disappointed, and like he’s trying to hide it.  Like he’s upset at having to see Matt.  Matt can understand that; if he’d been abandoned to the gladiator arenas, he’d probably resent the person who left him, too.  Hell, during some of his less noble periods in the cell, Matt had resented Shiro, even, for leaving them, him, leaving him behind.  So he gets it.  Still feels like a stab in the gut, though.

“That would be us,” Lance announces with metaphorical trumpets blaring and an arm thrown around Hunk, who is suspiciously watery-eyed.  Hunk sniffs and nods, with a hesitant smile directed at Katie for good measure.

Matt sees realization dawn on her face, and then it's slammed down under a glare so fierce that even Lance has the sense to cower a bit.

“You had my brother in the castle for _four quintents_ and you didn't _tell me_ _!?_ ” she screeches.  Matt winces; she's still tucked up under his arm, but she's whipcord tense with her fingers digging painfully into his forearm, and her indignant volume is something Matt would be proud of if it wasn't right next to his head.  She’s practically shaking, she’s so angry, despite the fact that she stubbornly refuses to detach.

“I had nothing to do with it!” Keith says defensively, crossing his arms.  “Shiro just told me!”

Katie turns her glare on Shiro and Matt almost feels sorry for him.  Katie’s scary when she’s mad, that hasn’t changed at all.  “Me neither, Pidge, I told you.  I just found out this morning.”

Hunk shrinks down into the collar of his shirt.  “Um.  Lance told me not to say anything?”

Lance makes a high-pitched noise of betrayal and wisely takes a step back.  “Hunk!” he whines.  “A little support here, maybe?”

“Nope.  No way.  Nada.  You’re on your own with this one, buddy.”

“Wow.  I can’t believe this.  Team Legs is no more.”

“Lance,” Matt says, feeling his own kind of betrayal.  Lance immediately goes quiet and drops the exaggerated expression of affront.  “Why didn’t you…”.  He’s not entirely sure what he wants to ask.  Why didn’t you say anything, why didn’t you tell her, why didn’t you tell _me_.  He realizes that Lance must have known the entire time, and any time he mentioned Pidge or asked Matt about Katie… Matt sets his jaw and takes a deep breath in through his nose.  It makes sense, he tells himself.  Too dangerous to mention in the cell, with the Galra listening.  And then he was hurt, they both were, trying to escape, and it wasn’t really the time.  But after… last night, the morning, whatever it was.  Lance could have said something.  He could have.  Matt’s teeth ache and he starts and shudders when an octopede crawls out of Katie’s mouth, glowing faintly purple.  He watches it climb up her face, and she looks right back at him as it squeezes into her ear.

“Matt?” she asks, when he gags.  Another octopede crawls out of her mouth and falls into her lap.  “What’s wrong?  Matt?”  

Matt feels the bugs crawling up his legs, both of them, and he shouts and slaps at the ones that try to burrow into the tender injury at his knee, opening it up again.  It leaks a foul-smelling mix of blood and pus and he feels seven-fingered hands touching his face in a hopeless attempt to comfort.  His entire body is burning and it seems like the octopedes keep coming, and coming, and coming…

“Having a hallucination,” his cellmate says, and Matt groans weakly.  The cell door clangs open with the screechy thud of metal-on-metal, loud and invasive and nothing at all like the cell he has later.  

A Galra drone marches through the door and leans over him.  It cups his head in one hand, fingers splayed around the side of his skull, and gently rubs his opposite shoulder.  “Matt, come back,” it says.

Matt struggles to twist out of its grip, but his leg won’t move, and he’s weak -- it doesn’t matter how much he struggles, he can’t get away from the hands and arms and the bugs.  He thrashes harder, ignoring the drone’s orders to “Calm down, Matt, please, you’re okay now, you’re safe.”  

He hears “Goddammit, Pidge, I know what I’m doing,” and then something bites into his hand, sharp and painful, but when he looks he doesn’t see anything, no injury, no blood.  That’s not right, he thinks woozily, that doesn’t happen yet.

“Where am I?” he gasps.  The drone wavers above him and it makes him dizzy.  His head hurts.

“Tell me what you see.”  The voice is incongruous.  It doesn’t belong, but Matt likes it, it feels safe, so he answers it anyway.

“Bugs,” he says, trying to focus.  “Drone -- no, wait.”  The drone flickers and disappears, and another face appears in its place, a human face, one that he recognizes immediately.  “Katie’s crying,” he frets.  Katie doesn’t cry.  Katie’s tiny and tough and Matt is going to kick the ass of whomever made Katie cry.

“Shut up.  Of course I’m crying, you’re… scaring me.”

Matt’s going to kick his own ass.  Katie laughs, a wet sound, and rolls her eyes at him.  She touches his shoulder and the amphibious hands of his cellmate disappear. “What else do you see?” she asks, eyes flickering sideways to where Matt thinks he remembers Lance being.

“Um…” the purple lights fade out, and Matt just sees a whole lot of bright teal and matte green.  He blinks a few times.  “Oh.  Spaceship.  Right.”

Lance is squeezing Matt’s left hand in both of his own.  The sharp pain is still there, but he can see its source, now, and Matt tugs back to try to look at his palm.  The skin is broken and a small bead of blood wells up as he watches.  “I’m here,” he says, to Lance, to Katie, whoever.  “I…”  His head hurts.  “The spaceship.  Castle. Something.  Right?”

Katie nods, and Matt realizes with a lurch that the crying wasn’t part of the hallucination.  “Katie,” he says.

She wipes her eyes aggressively on her sleeve and flaps her other hand.  “It’s fine, I’m fine, you just caught me off-guard, I wasn’t really expecting… well, whatever.  It’s okay.  It’s okay if you’re okay?”  She arches the last bit into a question, and Matt considers it seriously.

“I’m okay enough,” he answers with raw honesty.

Katie’s lips start trembling again and she buries her hands in the front of Matt’s scavenged clothes, her forehead resting against his clavicle.  “Love you,” she says, so quietly that Matt can barely hear her.  He wonders if he was supposed to hear at all.  Instead of deciding, Matt just rubs her back and waits for his equilibrium to settle again.


	15. Chapter 15

Matt perches on a stool, leg splayed awkwardly in front of him as Katie flits around her hangar, gathering tools and chattering about some project or other.  Every few moments, she'll pop her head up from wherever she is to look at him, or trot back to her little workstation and touch him with a furtive finger or two.  Matt doesn't think she's consciously aware of it and he grins to himself.  Ammunition for later.  Not that he minds, or can fault her, really.  He'd probably be hovering, too, if he could move with any grace at all.

They're alone in the big space, Katie having forcibly evicted the rest of their companions on the grounds of necessary sibling bonding and her angry indignation with the others.  Mostly Lance.  Matt’s pretty peeved himself but he can’t hold a grudge like Katie can; he'll have to make sure she doesn't murder him or something later.

“Mmkay,” she says finally, looking at the assembled tools with all the pride of a monarch surveying her kingdom, and Matt pictures her with a crown and grins again. “That’s everything I need.  You all good in there?”  She wiggles her fingers near her ear.

Matt rolls his eyes.  “Yeah.  All screws in the proper holes.”

Katie nods, looking at her assembled tools again and not him.  “Okay.  Okay.  So, what… is it?  Just so I know what to watch out for.  Just the hallucinations?”

Throat tight, Matt shakes his head.  “No, uh.”  He pauses to clear his throat.  “Flashbacks, too.  Panic attacks.  You know, the usual.”

His joke falls flat.  Completely flat.  Katie considers him, eyes bright and sharp, and Matt does his best to pack it all away, hide the problems in their own designated boxes.

“Wanna talk about it?” Katie asks.

“No,” Matt answers hurriedly, the ringing in his ears getting louder.  “Not… not yet.  Need distance.  For objectivity.”

He knows she’ll understand, and she does.  Katie goes a little misty at the reference to one of their father’s many trademark words of wisdom, but she gives him a quick, efficient hug around the shoulders and then shifts back into techie mode.

“Okay,” she says, nudging her glasses back into place.  “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

Between the two of them, they heft Matt’s leg onto the makeshift worktable.  It’s pretty trashed, even by Matt’s admittedly low standards, and Katie whistles low under her breath.  Her glasses flash and her eyes spark with calculating interest.  In almost any other situation, it would be unnerving, and maybe it would be for Lance or Shiro or one of the others, but Matt appreciates the clinical, scientific approach.  It’s familiar, and it helps him detach himself from everything that’s happened, falling back into that pattern with Katie.

“Definitely Galra design,” Katie says in an even, measured voice, and Matt wonders if it’s by habit or if she’s talking to some recording device… somewhere.  “Obvious given the origin.  Confirmation in the scriptwork, close similarities in construction to drone parts.  Badly damaged, no evidence of prior maintenance.”  Yeah, she’s definitely not talking to him, but Matt offers his own input anyway, leaning forward to get a better look as she pokes and prods.

“It usually responds to nervous impulses.  Not quite like a real leg but easy to compensate for.  It became unresponsive after --” Matt gulps, and the cell flashes over his eyelids.  He shakes his head to clear the mental image.  “After an electrostatic shock.  I, uh, modified it so that it’d lock and weight-bear.”

“And by ‘modified’, you mean you jammed a chunk of sheet metal in the knee joint.”

“Yeah.”  

Katie gives him a look.  “Any weaponization?  Sensation?”

“Nada to both.”

She pokes at his toe experimentally, and Matt sees it, but obviously he doesn’t feel anything, and the leg lacks reflexes and stays still.  Katie moves up and down, testing his toes, the arch of his foot, the back of his knee, watching for responses that don’t come.

“Different from Shiro’s,” she says to herself, tone different than when she’s speaking for the record.

“Shiro’s arm?”

Katie hums.  “Get him to show you later,” is her entirely unhelpful answer.  

Matt leans back and stares up at the green lion’s chin, high above him.  Katie’s voice is soothing and even, and with no sensation in the leg it’s all too easy to forget that it’s broken.  He carefully, tentatively, lets himself fall into believing that things are going to be okay again.

“I wonder what this --” Katie starts, and then Matt’s entire body jolts and he jumps and yelps.

“Katie!  What did you just do!”

“Oops,” Katie says.  She holds up the leg in one hand and waves it.  The toes flop from side to side, and when Matt chances a glance down he sees his leg just _end_ , and it’s the only time he’s seen it like that, and his stomach roils as his brain protests that there’s supposed to be something there.

“Oh hell,” he says faintly.  “I _felt_ that.  I didn’t think it came off.”

“Makes it easier to work on,” Katie says indifferently.  She sets it back down on the table and readjusts the lighting to illuminate it better, and Matt tries to unclench himself.  The sensation of having the leg removed is utterly bizarre.  Almost like popping off a suction cup, but if he’d been unaware that the cup was there in the first place.  Nothing about it was painful, or particularly unpleasant, but he definitely felt it.  And there’s a feeling of wrongness -- sure, the fake leg feels strange and alien and foreign on his body, but having it removed feels like more of a loss.  Like something’s missing.

Matt laughs at that thought and tries to unscramble himself.  “Leg’s not the only thing,” he says to himself, raising his stump to poke around at the connection ports. Most of it is like the leg, sensationless, but when he taps one of the short, protruding plugs, what’s left of his leg spasms.  “Gah!”  He swears in as many languages as he can remember, most of which aren’t from Earth, and shivers.  “Ahh, that did not feel good, shit, wow.”  The tingling hums back down his side, into his hip and back down out the bottom of his stump again, and when he wiggles it tentatively, all seems to be in working order.

“Huh,” Katie says, having abandoned his leg on a nearby worktable to peer at the port.  “D’you think that’s --”

“--nervous input,” Matt finishes, nodding.  “Yeah.  Wow.  Note to self, don’t touch the tinglesticks.”

Katie laughs and groans all at the same time.  “I forgot you do that,” she says, her voice unusually fond.  Well, it’s been an unusual day, Matt’ll give her this one.  “I missed your stupid nicknames.”

“I missed your stupid face,” he retorts automatically, then cuts himself off.  Katie is quiet.  

“Hey, Matt?” she says finally.  Her back is turned, towards her workbench, and Matt can see her picking things up and turning them over in her hands before she sets them back down.  He leans back against the wall and waits, and Katie takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders, but she still doesn’t turn to look at him.  “Is Dad… never mind.”

Don’t, Matt thinks.  Don’t think about Dad.  Not now.  Bad timing.  “No.  I don’t know.  We were… separated.”  The word is sour on his tongue and he bubbles up with fear and resentment.  And guilt, so much guilt.  “Got caught sabotaging the mining equipment,” he adds, aware that it explains absolutely nothing but not wanting to go into more detail just yet.  Detail like the sparking of manacles and hoarse screaming and a club made out of a broken pickaxe and -- no.  No.  He rubs frantically at his wrists, feeling the ragged, beautiful scar tissue there.

“We’ll find him,” Katie says, steel in her voice, and Matt looks up.  Her shoulders are tense and stiff, bunched up around her neck.  “We will.”

Matt doesn’t know what to say, and Katie refuses to look at him, anyway, poring over his leg with stiff determination.  She starts speaking in that smooth, observational voice again, and the familiar tinkering sound and blessedly unfamiliar lighting soon lulls Matt into a drowse.

“Lightweight,” she says, and Matt remembers how heavy his leg was, before they took it, puffed up and swollen with infection.  He remembers being feverish and delusional and knowing he was going to die, because he knows what the symptoms of sepsis are and hey, he’s got them all.  He remembers calling for his dad but not if he was there or not, and he remembers being lifted onto a gurney and wheeled away while someone called his name.  He remembers a voice; “This one is damaged.  Fix it and put it with the others.”

Matt jerks awake, gasping and sweating, and he gets twisted up in the light blanket around his shoulders and falls to the floor with a loud thump.

Katie jumps, too, letting out an impressive stream of curses as she upends a bowl of screws.  

“M’fine,” Matt chokes out between gasps, before Katie can ask.  And he is.  He’s okay.  He knows where he is.  “Bad dream.”

Katie sets the bowl on the table in front of her.  She seems bothered, and while Matt knows there’s a lot to be bothered by, he still wonders.  He wraps himself back up in the blanket and makes himself as comfortable as he can against the wall, concentrating on slowing his breathing and his heart rate.  It feels like some time has passed, but he’s lost all sense of proportion in that regard.  Could have been minutes, could have been days.  He has no idea anymore.  

Katie grabs a tray of something and slides down on the floor beside Matt, tucking her knees up under her chin.  She holds out the tray.  “Hunk brought food,” she says by way of an explanation, and Matt’s jaw drop when he realizes that he can smell it.

He’s been subsisting off of purple goo since his capture, and purple goo doesn’t smell or taste like anything at all.  The foodstuffs on the platter both smell and look unfamiliar, but now that his brain knows the connection between scent and sustenance his stomach starts tying itself in eager knots.  He grabs almost aggressively for the closest thing to him -- some kind of blue plant, it smells savoury and just a little spicy, and he crams it in his mouth.

“Oh, god,” he moans, entire body wilting.  It’s the best thing he’s ever eaten.  By far.  He relishes the pops of flavour and the pinprick pain of whatever spice that is, and he feels the warm mass of the bolus moving into his body, even as he takes another bite, and another, eating so quickly he’s at genuine risk for choking.

“That’s gross,” Katie complains, and when Matt squints at her he sees an expression of disgusted incredulity.  “I’ve never seen anyone eat like that.  And I’ve lived with Lance for like two years.”  Matt ignores her and snatches another piece off the plate, this one alarmingly red with orange pinstripes.  It’s unexpectedly sweet and almost citrus-y.  His stomach growls in loud appreciation.

Despite her loud disgust, Katie doesn’t move away.  “You should’ve said you were hungry.”

Matt would have, but he honestly hadn’t realized.  Food hasn’t been anything more than a chore for a while, now.  He sort of forgot about it.  The tight, empty pain in his stomach was so much an afterthought compared to everything else that was happening that he’d forgotten it wasn’t normal.  But like hell is he going to admit as much to Katie.  He ignores her and grabs another fruit.  Katie starts going on about creating a high-calorie meal plan with Hunk, which Matt is all for, if it means more good food. Who knew the big yellow guy was some kind of galactic chef.  He clears the plate in record time, balancing it on his one knee when Katie gets bored of watching him stuff his face and hops up to go tinker around the hangar.

When he’s done, she bounces back over with what basically amounts to a modified pogo stick, and holds it out, posture demanding.

“No,” Matt says.  “Absolutely not.”

She brandishes it at him like a weapon.  “It’s either this or hop around like an idiot until I fix your leg.”

Matt grumbles at her.  “Who made you the leg head?”

“Arm, actually,” she says incomprehensibly and with a smug grin.  “Put it on.”

Matt ends up half-bouncing into the castle ship’s lounge area, clinging to Katie’s arm for balance and dear life.  It’s an effective ice breaker, if nothing else, and Lance’s loud guffaw is the precursor to giggles from the other assembled… paladins.

“Yeah, laugh it up, fuzzball,” Matt mutters, sparking another round of laughter from Lance and a groan from Hunk.  He feels intensely awkward, like he’s on display, and because he never knows when to stop, he waves and introduces himself with, “I’m Matt, I’d say I like puppies and long walks on ice moons but we all know how that turned out last time.”

Shiro actually winces at that.  So does Matt.  Ice effectively refrozen.  “Sorry,” he mumbles awkwardly, and Keith scowls, hovering over Shiro like some kind of floppy red guard dog, and Matt pictures it and laughs.

“Uh, Matt?” Katie prompts.

He shakes his head with a grin. “Angry Clifford. Down, boy.”

There's a pause while the paladins look around at each other, silent except for Matt’s spurts of giggles.  Then Lance’s eyes go wide, and he exclaims, “Oh!  Keith, right?” and bursts into laughter of his own.

Keith clearly doesn't get the joke and he puts his hands on his hips and frowns.  “You're both nuts,” he declares.

“Guilty,” Matt says easily, and Lance shrugs agreement.

In the cell, Matt had grown accustomed to always being able to touch or see Lance at all times.  The only times he'd couldn't were when the Galra came to take him away for “interrogation”.  Even though he's still a little angry, Matt’s been fretting over not knowing where Lance was since his leg popped off, and relief makes his emotions loose.

Lance shifts his body in a half-turn, opening himself to the unoccupied space at his side.  On a couch.  A real live couch.  Matt tugs at Katie's arm and she lets him guide the way, and Lance's eyes light up in guilty relief.

“I'm mad at you,” Matt declares, though the effect is ruined by the way he immediately grasps at Lance's shirt.  The touch is like a balm, soothing the edges of Matt's frazzled reality.

“As long as you don't garble the voice transmitter in my helmet we're good.”  Lance adjusts around Matt easily enough, with an arm slung casually over his shoulders. Judging by the way the muscles in Lance’s arm jump and the way Katie twitches away from him, Matt figures he’s poking at her face or pulling her hair, or just otherwise being a menace.  His sibling instincts approve.

“That was one time!” Katie protests.  “And you deserved it!”

“It wasn't my fault!  It was Keith!”

Katie reaches across Matt’s stomach to slap Lance on the thigh, thus launching an epic slap-fight, each side using Matt as a kind of shelter.  He’s jostled around as their antics become increasingly violent, rocking back and forth between them.  A misjudged smack catches Matt across the cheek and he bursts into cackles even as Shiro asks, in a long-suffering voice, for them to settle down.  Matt isn’t the least bit surprised when they don’t.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologizes for the late post, I had a few unexpected days with no internet.

“Practically nothing can get Shiro to give us the day off,” Katie chirps as she drags him by the hand down yet another near-identical corridor.  Matt’s half-bouncing on the pogo leg, clinging to Katie for balance and dear life.  She’s ostensibly giving him a tour of the castle, though frankly she’s going so fast and Matt is so overloaded that he’s conscious of not retaining any of the information.  He refuses to say anything, though, because the way Katie’s talking -- the speed, the jumping between topics, the not giving him room to breathe -- this is the way they’ve always communicated.  He’s not going to be the one to point out that everything isn’t peaches and cream and completely normal now that he’s escaped or been rescued or whatever they want to call it.  Granted, normally Matt would be talking with her, overlapping voices, but Katie seems to be taking his silence in stride.  Which is good, he thinks, because Matt’s pretty sure that intelligent words are entirely beyond him at this point.

“He can be such a hardass sometimes, was he always like that?”  She doesn’t wait for an answer, which is also good, because Matt has forgotten who they’re talking about.  “I mean, on the way to Kerberos, Dad was in charge, right, so Shiro would’ve had to take orders from him, and I can’t imagine you listening to him anyway, so probably not, maybe that’s a new thing.  Although the black lion is supposed to like decisive, natural leaders, so maybe this is normal for him and he was just all repressed on the mission.  That would be hilarious.  You have to dish on the old Shiro stories at some point.  I need ammo.  Anyway, here’s the training deck, aka Keith’s favourite place in the entire universe, known and unknown.”  She rolls her eyes and grins at her own joke, and presses her hand to a panel in the wall.  Matt glances at the label above the doorway, trying to memorize the symbols, but to his frustration they slip out of mind almost immediately.

The door opens with a near-soundless hum, and Katie steadies him as he bounce-limps into what appears to be an observation deck over a wide space.  He lets go of Katie’s hand and makes his careful way around the room, running his fingertips over the Altean control pads and peering blurrily out of the floor-to-ceiling windows.  He can make out movement, blurs of chrome and red and black, but he can’t resolve the image in any more detail than that.

“See?”  Katie says.  “Told you Keith’d be in there.”  She reaches around Matt to poke at a button, and Matt startles when he suddenly hears the sound of grunting and panting and a clang of metal.  

“You were supposed to take the day off!” she yells, and the action from below comes to a pause.

Keith’s voice comes through with surprising clarity, and surprising language.  Katie cheerfully replies in kind, to Matt’s amusement.  

“Boys,” Shiro says dryly, and Matt jumps.  He hadn’t realized that Shiro was there, and he squints over the training arena until he sees a vaguely humanoid black shape moving forward from the back of the room.  He thinks Shiro puts his hands on his hips and looks up at them but he honestly can’t tell.  Still, just in case, he waves and salutes mockingly.

“Sorry, Shiro,” Katie says, unrepentant.  Keith mumbles something Matt can’t make out, and then Katie says, “We’re coming down!” and the communicator clicks off.

It's then that Katie notices his squinting. “I bet we could make you some new glasses.  I dunno if we can measure your prescription but we can probably get the castle to manufacture something, it’s pretty high tech.”  She takes his hand again and leads him out of the room, slowing when he catches the substitute prosthetic on a chair leg and nearly topples over.  

“If you don’t give me my leg back soon I’m going to kick you,” he mumbles.

“You’d have to catch me, first,” Katie shoots back quickly,  “and you definitely can’t on that thing.  It was the best I could do in like fifteen minutes, cut me some slack here.”

The leg wobbles again and Matt swears in a language that’s neither English nor Japanese nor Galran, and Katie just laughs at him.  Traitor.

Shiro and Keith are waiting when they get down to the main level.  Shiro gives him a funny look and Matt lurks awkwardly while Katie pokes at Keith’s buttons and Keith responds, every time.  Kid didn’t grow up with siblings, Matt thinks.  Definitely not ones like Katie, at any rate.

“--show Matt how it’s done?”  Katie’s saying when Matt tunes into the conversation, grinning with all her teeth.  This clearly being a language Keith speaks, he rolls his shoulders and glances sideways at Shiro in barely-concealed anticipation.  Matt thinks, there’s one who would’ve been good for the gladiator arena, and he immediately hates himself for it.  The idea of having to watch them fight -- watch _Shiro_ fight, after everything… Matt doesn’t want it.  At all.  Watching a gladiator-style fight isn’t quite the last thing he wants to do right now, but it’s up there.

Shiro hesitates, looking up at Matt and glancing away again.  “I’m not sure,” he hedges, and Matt feels a flash of contrary anger.

“Do it,” he says, voice harsh.  He sets his jaw to keep from scowling or sticking out his tongue or something childish like that.  

Keith bristles like an overprotective guard dog, but Shiro just gives Matt another look, carefully blank, and Matt fights to keep his own expression as neutral as possible. Shiro wants to be passive and evasive, fine.  Two can play at that game.  

After their brief standoff, Shiro sighs.  “Fine.  Pidge, can you execute the program?  Start at level four.”

“You got it, bossman,” Katie answers, and then she grins, nudges Matt’s arm, and goes scampering out the door, presumably back up to the observation level.  The three of them left wait in silence, awkward on Shiro and Matt’s end, but Keith doesn’t seem to notice, too wrapped up in stretching and doing practice feints with his giant red sword.

“Alrighty, brothers and gentlemen --” Katie’s disembodied voice floats out.  Matt rolls his eyes and smirks.  “-- Get ready to fight!  Gladiator level four, tag-team program, drop in t-minus five seconds.”

Matt slides down the wall, legs splayed in front of him, and Shiro and Keith take up positions within a marked circle on the floor that Matt would swear wasn’t there a few seconds ago.  Katie counts down, and when she hits zero, a hole opens up in the ceiling and a cycloptid robot drops to the floor and goes on the attack.  Matt rubs compulsively at the scab on his palm.

It’s interesting watching them fight, if he looks at it objectively.  The robot’s programming is clearly good, and Matt might not be any expert brawler but he’s read up on the theory and history of close combat on Earth, and he has common sense besides, thank you very much.  He doesn't really have a frame of reference for what "level four" entails, but he can see the robot moving at an even, calculated speed, and every so often it makes a mistake that even Matt’s blurry eyes can pick out.  Shiro and Keith work remarkably well together, which fits the mental schema Matt has for the both of them from before Kerberos.  Keith is aggressive and swift with his sword, and even though he’s still a little jerky, he moves quickly and without hesitation.  Again, Matt has the inappropriate thought that he’d be a good gladiator.

That train of thought completely sidelines his careful objectivity, and his eyes drift over to Shiro.  Shiro doesn’t have a weapon, for some reason.  Matt wonders about that idly as he watches him move.  Shiro is more graceful than Keith, not quite as fast but more controlled, every movement calculated for efficiency.  He looks like someone who’s fought countless hand-to-hand battles.  

He _is_ someone who’s fought countless hand-to-hand battles.  

Matt’s stomach starts churning, and overlaid with the sound of Shiro and Keith’s heavy breathing and quick, clipped comments to each other, he hears the obscene screaming of the crowd and smells the dank heaviness of the Galran gladiator arena.  He breathes deep and focuses on what’s real, in front of him.  Clean lines and metal walls, not the rough earthen floor of the arena.  Keith and Shiro working together, expressions focused but loose.  Katie’s constant narration from somewhere above, describing changes in their physiological states and the Gladiator’s simulators.  He knows where he is.  His leg doesn’t hurt, and he knows where he is.  He’s fine, Shiro’s fine, they’re safe.

On the floor, Shiro’s arm lights up a glowing purple.  And Matt scrambles to his feet and bolts.

*

“There you are.”

Matt curls up on himself, tucked against the foot of another of those giant robot lions. The biggest he’s seen so far.  Its black head is so far above him he can’t make out anything but the colour, but the hangar is similar enough to Katie’s and the paws are a dead giveaway.  He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t look up.

“Your sister is worried,” Shiro continues, in that same light, conversational tone.  “So are the rest of us.”  Shiro pauses, clearly waiting for some response, but Matt doesn’t move, apart from a guilty twitch.  God, this guilt is going to kill him.

He hears, rather than sees, Shiro settling down on the floor with him, close, probably, but Shiro doesn’t touch him, and after a few moments of listening to their overlapping breathing, some of the tension in Matt’s body drains away, and he rubs his eyes tiredly.

“How’d you find me?” he croaks, and then winces at the sound of his own voice.  His throat is rough and dry from hyperventilating, and he licks at his lips reflexively.  

“Black told me,” Shiro answers.  His voice sounds soft and fond, and Matt peeks up from his knees -- knee -- to see Shiro sitting two feet away, patting a metal claw that’s thicker than his entire body.  

“What?”

Shiro glance at him out of the corner of his eye, then looks back at the claw.  “My lion,” he explains.  “The black lion.  I’m the black paladin of Voltron.  She let me know that you were here.”  He pauses, then adds ruefully,  “When she decided I was needed, anyway.”

Matt doesn’t understand.  It’s a spaceship.  It can’t talk.  It can’t make _decisions_.  It’s a machine.  His only idea is that perhaps it has some kind of advanced alien AI that links in with the helmet communicators the paladins all seem to have.  He’ll have to remember to ask Katie about it later.  He rests his head tiredly on his knee again, staring past Shiro at the blurry hangar wall in between slow blinks.

“Can I ask why you came here?”  Shiro asks carefully, and Matt shrugs.

“Didn’t.  I got lost.  I have no idea where I am.”

That startles a laugh out of Shiro, and despite himself and the roiling uneasiness in his gut, Matt’s own lips quirk up.

“This place is pretty huge,” Shiro admits, dropping his military straightness to slouch back against Black’s paw a bit.  “I still get lost from time to time myself.  Most of us do.  I think Pidge knows her way around pretty well, but that’s because she’s nosy and doesn’t sleep.”

Matt’s little grin widens.  “Sounds like Katie.”

“Yeah.  Are you…?” Shiro trails off, looking intensely uncomfortable.  His ears go red.  Matt forgot they did that.  There’s a faint humming sound that seems to follow him around -- from his arm, Matt guesses -- and that’s new, but it’s almost soothing.  Like purring.

“I’m, you know,” he says, to Shiro’s unasked question, and Shiro’s shoulders drop when he nods.  “Where are you, uh, at?”

Shiro’s head jerks up, and he looks at Matt with surprise.  Matt jumps, too, at the sudden movement, and for a moment they just stare wide-eyed at each other.  Shiro’s metal hand clenches and releases a few times.

“I -- I’m fine.  Am I that obvious?”  Shiro laughs self-consciously, but his voice is vulnerable, and Matt sighs to himself.  Guess they’re having a Talk, then.  

He really doesn’t want to do this.

“We were abducted by the same aliens, right?  I mean, being a gladiator doesn’t hold a candle to working in the mines, obviously, mines are so much worse... but, uh, yeah, if you weren’t at least some level of fucked up I think I’d be personally offended.”  Matt winces internally at his own blunt tactlessness, but, it's out there now. Too late to do anything about that.  “I’m being sarcastic, if that wasn’t clear.  Is there such thing as space sarcasm?  I don’t think the other aliens did sarcasm.  Maybe I just forgot.”

Shiro picks guiltily at a speck of dried dirt on Black’s claw.  “It must’ve still been bad.”

Matt grimaces and waves his hands.  “No, no, I was just being a dick, c’mon, you know me.  Manual labour isn’t nearly as bad as almost certain death.  Really, Shiro. Give me a little credit here, I _am_ smart enough to know the difference.”  He pauses, swallowing convulsively before he adds, “All of my, you know --” he wiggles a finger in a circle around his ear “--it’s, uh, my own fault, anyway, I shouldn’t’ve -- well.  Shoulda just kept my head down and my mouth shut.”  That’s what they had always told him, at the Garrison.  Toe the line, keep his smart comments to himself, use his brain for something other than biotech every once in awhile.

He expects Shiro to come back with some barb about how Matt’s the most idiotic smart person he’s ever known -- that’s Shiro’s line, his part in the script, and Matt needs him to follow it.  He needs Shiro to prove that things are okay.  That they can still be normal, even after everything that’s happened to them.

Instead, Shiro folds in on himself and says, “I’m sorry,” in a tiny little voice, and Matt’s heart takes off in his chest.

“No,” he hears himself say.  “No.  No, fuck you, that’s not right, what are you saying, you aren’t allowed…” He gulps, trying to rein himself in, regain control. This isn’t right.  But he can fix it.  He needs to fix it.  And he can do that as long as he gets himself back under control.  Dammit.  “You don’t get to be sorry.”

Shiro sounds like he’s frowning, but Matt’s already limited scope of vision has tightened in on him and he can’t see enough to be able to tell.  “Why not?” he says tightly.

Matt gestures haphazardly.  “Because --!”

He can’t find the words.  Damn his broken brain to the deepest pits of hell, he needs to explain himself and he can’t find the words.  His thoughts swirl wordlessly in his head, just feeling and colour and sounds and there’s too much, it pushes the words out and he can’t find them.  He growls in frustration and pushes himself up to pace, only to fall flat on his face when he forgets -- _again_ \-- about the stupid bouncy leg.  “Fuck!” he yells.   _That_  word is still crystal clear.

A hand touches his back and he jerks away, flipping and scooting across the floor.  

Shiro snaps his hand back like Matt’s bitten it, hurt and confusion all over his face.  “I’m sorry!” he says again. “Sorry.”

Matt grits his teeth, shaking his head like a dog.  It never works, to clear the fuzz from his brain.  He always tries it but it never works.  “No.  No!”

“Why not?” Shiro yells, agitated now, too, and he throws his arms in the air.

“Because then what does that make me!” Matt's voice cracks, and it echoes around the hangar and hits him from every direction at once, and he cringes.  Shiro doesn’t say anything, or move at all, and Matt scratches desperately at his hand.  “What do you even have to be sorry for?” he says in a quieter, more pointed voice.

“I left you!” Shiro shouts.  He slumps and looks at the floor.  “I left you behind.  I left without finding you and your dad first.  I hurt you.  I’m _sorry_.”

“That’s stupid.”

Shiro’s head jerks up.  “What?”

“That’s _stupid_ ,” Matt repeats, more vehemently this time.  “You saved my life.  I thought you _died for me_.  It’s not like I was sitting around waiting for you to come rescue me, I thought you were dead because you tried to protect me.  I thought you were dead because I’m...”

“You’re not weak,” Shiro says immediately, and Matt barks a humourless laugh.

“Oh, really?  Who managed to win who-fucking-knows how many gladiator fights and then escape and get back to Earth all on his own, here?  Only to jump immediately back into space with a bunch of teenagers to fight a goddamn _war_.  And who was too much of a wimp to fight anything and managed to not only _fail_ to escape -- more than once! -- but also to go nuts in the process?  Oh, yeah, it was me!  The tiny nerd who couldn’t even handle just being _alone_!  I couldn’t save you, I couldn’t save my dad, I couldn’t save Lance, I couldn’t even save myself.  I’m fucking pathetic.  And _you’re_ apologizing for that?  No!  That’s not how this works!”

“It’s not your fault,” Shiro starts, and Matt interrupts him again.

“It’s the fucking _Galra_!” Matt screams, aware that he’s hysterical and unable to do the slightest thing about it.  “Those purple assholes took us and they ruined it, they ruined everything, they took you and they took my leg and my dad and, and my, I, I can’t even _think_ anymore…”  He’s gasping for desperate breaths and he loses his train of thought like a wisp of smoke and he just sits on the floor and shakes.

Arms wrap around him -- one soft and warm, the other unyielding and cool, big enough that Matt feels like he’s being smothered. “Don’t touch me,” he gasps, but he doesn't move away.  He can’t breathe, can’t shake off the hysterical fury.  “Don’t…”

“Matt,” Shiro’s voice says.  He sounds... scared.  Matt doesn’t know what to do about that.  He can’t fix it.  He can’t fix anything.  He focuses on the feeling of Shiro's heartbeat, fast against his back, and it helps, a little.  Not enough.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SEASON THREE, GUYS!!
> 
> I woke up early just to watch it. So much new information in there! 
> 
> This one's more of a transitional chapter, but hopefully you enjoy it anyway.

The castle ship is meant to have a crew of at least fifty.  Skeleton crew.  It was two hundred plus during wartime, according to Coran, and so there are plenty of empty officer’s rooms.  The ones offered for Matt to choose from are not as large or luxurious as the paladins’ (apparently, though the only one he’s seen is Katie’s and it’s so full of junk that any air of luxury is long gone), but they’re good enough.  Hell, he’s been living in a barren cell, pretty much anything is better than that.  These are private, and they have beds.  The first night, Matt wonders when the last time he slept in a bed was.  He knows now that it’s been almost three years since he left Earth, which makes him twenty-three, probably.  Three years of his life he’ll never get back.  When he’d accidentally voiced that thought over their communal dinner, Hunk had brightened and immediately offered to make him a much-belated birthday cake -- apparently they’d found a flour substitute sometime before they’d lost Lance, but he hadn’t had time to experiment with it yet.  Matt isn’t sure how he feels about being a culinary guinea pig, though really, it's a role he should be used to by now.

Matthew Holt, PhD, professional subject-of-experimentation.  Yeah, no thanks.  

He stands in the entry of his assigned room, startling slightly when the door zips shut behind him.  He’s alone.  Every night, he’s alone.

He doesn’t like it.  One of the first things he’d done, the very first evening, was adjust the lighting using the control panel by the door.  The castle defaults to soft blue lighting, which is fine, but when he’s feeling edgy and claustrophobic -- which is most evenings -- it helps a little that he’s changed everything to a bright lemon yellow. Colour theory -- as far from purple as he can get it.

Katie explained that the Altean day-night cycle isn’t quite the same as on Earth -- one day is around twenty Earth hours, apparently, and they call it a quintent, though Matt doesn’t know why, when it doesn’t seem to be segmented by fives -- but it’s close enough.  When it’s late enough in the relative evening that everyone has dispersed, Katie going to her room with a stern order from Shiro to actually sleep tonight, please, they all seem to be under the impression that he needs some alone time.  Which is fair, really.  Matt’s always been an introvert.  Like Katie, and their parents.  There’s a reason four people needed such a big house to live in -- that, and the constant experimentation.  The entire basement level was converted into a workroom-slash-lab when Matt was eleven, once Katie was old enough to start destroying and creating things.  So yeah, Matt should appreciate the time alone, to collect his thoughts and recharge.  That’s how it always has been.  He shakes off his uneasiness with aggressive self-admonishment, pries off the bouncy leg, and crawls under the blankets.  The lights dim but don’t turn off, and he stares across the room at the wall.

“Relax, Matt,” he mutters to himself.  “Sleep deprivation is not fun.  You know that from firsthand experience.  Let’s not do that again.”

He stares at the wall.  It’s a practiced dance, by now.

He tries to flip onto his other side, but having his back exposed feels intensely vulnerable and his heart rate nearly doubles in the few seconds it takes to flip himself over. The bed is soft, and very comfortable, and when the castle’s morning wake-up call sounds several hours later, Matt finds himself curled up on the floor, back to the corner, and the loud klaxon brings him gasping out of a flashback and having not slept a wink.  He straps on his bouncy leg and limps his way to the bathroom, and then has to find a communicator panel to ask for help because he still doesn’t know how to get to the kitchen.

Breakfast is a quiet affair, which suits Matt just fine.  He was never a morning person pre-Kerberos, himself.  Now he wonders if he’s really any kind of a person at all.  It makes sense for the first few days to have been an aberration, though.  He doesn’t blame the others for being relieved to see Lance, and confused about seeing him. He’s still a little confused about seeing them, too.  Especially the alien with the Australian-ish accent.  Matt can’t help but laugh every time Coran speaks, and if the looks he gets for it are any indication, he’s causing offense, but he really can’t help it.  It’s justs so utterly incongruous.  At least the Galra and the other prisoners he worked with in the mines had notably alien biology and whatever translation algorithms the Galra use tended to match Matt’s accent.  None of them looked like skinny middle-aged men with elf ears and giant moustaches who spoke like they were going to go barbeque some shrimp.

“Hey Coran,” Matt says, interrupting something, probably.  He hasn’t been paying attention to the muted conversation going on around him.  He leans forward, pushing aside a plate of green goo that he can’t stomach, anyway, it being far too similar to prison fare for him to be able to handle.  At least it isn’t purple.

“Hm?  What can I do for you?”  Coran’s moustache puffs up importantly and Matt stares at it.

“Say ‘a dingo ate my baby’.”

“A dingo ate my baby?  What in the name of quiznak is that supposed to mean?”

Lance snickers and Hunk has a sudden coughing fit.  Katie is far too bleary-eyed to be able to react much, but she does kick Matt’s ankle in what he chooses to think of as approval.  Shiro says lightly, “Be nice, Matt,” and Keith just looks confused by the whole thing.

“I don’t get it,” he declares, at the same time that Matt says, “You’re not the boss of me,” and Lance bursts into full-bodied laughter.

“That does raise an interesting question, though,” Katie muses, and she uses her spoon to gesture between Shiro and Matt.  A glob of green goop flies off the end and hits Matt on the cheek.  “Oops.  Which one of you was the more senior astronaut?”

“Katie, no,” Matt protests, as Shiro grins.

“Technically,” Shiro begins, with the most shit-eating grin Matt has ever seen on him, “our commission doesn’t officially end until our return to Earth.  And since you haven’t done that yet, I _am_ the boss of you.”

Matt salutes him with the wrong hand and mumbles, “Yeah, whatever.”

“That’s yeah, whatever _sir_ ,” Shiro teases.  

“You can argue the chain of your command later.”  The princess’s voice rings out over the table, sounding exasperated and stern, and everyone quiets down immediately. She’s definitely the one in charge, Matt thinks, whatever Shiro wants to say.  

“Whipped,” he says under his breath, and Hunk chokes again.

Allura clears her throat pointedly and Hunk sinks down in his seat.  “As I was _saying_ , you can discuss this later.  With all of the... upheaval lately, we have lost a good deal of time for your training and we are already on a tight schedule.  I expect you all on the training deck in full armour in ten dobashes.  And do _not_ expect an easy day.”

Lance groans loudly, but he meets Allura’s eye and seems to think better of whatever complaint he was going to make, and instead busies himself with stuffing down the rest of his green food goo and bounding out to get changed.  Shiro and Keith are already in their shiny white armour, but Hunk follows closely after Lance and Matt is watching him go when Katie tugs on his arm.  “C’mon,” she says, gesturing impatiently.  “I have something for you.”

“How long is ten dobashes?”  Matt asks as he gets turned around again during the trip down to Katie’s hangar workroom.  

“A dobash is like a minute.  Ish,” she answers, and she deposits him with surprising force on a stool, pops off the substitute leg (ignoring Matt’s indignant protest, because what the hell, a little warning maybe?), and disappears behind him only to reappear even before he can twist around to look at her with the Galran prosthetic in hand.  It’s a little battered-looking, but all of the obvious damage has been repaired and when she tests the joint articulation, they all move the way they’re supposed to.

“Speedy,” he remarks, impressed, and she shrugs but the dusting of a blush across her cheeks tells him she’s pleased.  He reaches one hand out for the leg, and ruffles her hair with the other.  She squawks indignantly and wiggles away, but as soon as she’s out of arm's reach she leans forward again, eagerly watching him inspect the leg.

“Sounds different,” he says, tapping his fingers on the casing of the shin.

Katie nods.  “Yeah, me’n’Hunk finished up few mods to it last night, we realigned the internal structure and reinforced it with this really nifty alloy a lot of the parts in the lions are made of, it’s super strong, rigid against blunt force and point pressure but way more flexible than, say, steel, and it’s super lightweight.  The neural link network was completely fried so we rebuilt that from scratch, and it looks like it’s not quite the right size but I didn’t want to wake you up to measure you so we just put in some adjustors at the joints and the socket, so we can make it fit a bit better later.  There’s a bunch of other stuff, too, it wasn’t super well constructed, totally different from Shiro’s, but c’mon, put it on, I want to see what you think!”

Matt takes a few seconds to mentally sort through Katie’s words, hating how slow he feels.  But after a moment, he nods, and crossing the stump of his left leg over his right thigh, he pulls off the protective cover over the nerve ports, carefully lines it up, and takes a deep breath before pushing the pieces together.

Something engages and the two parts of his leg jolt together, sending a fiery spark singing through his body, surprising and painful enough to make him shout, but it’s over a second later and he gasps, staring wide-eyed at the leg.

“Ow, fuck,” he mutters, but he ignores Katie’s alarmed questioning and stands up slowly, holding onto the stool for balance.

The leg holds.  He takes a few steps, noting with surprised pleasure that the leg responds much more naturally than it used to, knee and ankle bending and releasing with just the right amount of tension.  If it weren’t for the fact that he can’t feel it beyond a general sort of pressure around his stump, it would almost feel like walking on a real leg.

“Wow.  This is… thanks, Katie,” he says with naked sincerity.

She flushes for real this time, and shrugs.  “It’s okay?”

“Yeah.  Yeah, it’s good.”  He reaches for her, and she steps willingly into the hug.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” he asks into her hair, and she shrugs and makes a non-committal noise.  “Very Holt of you,” he says, half-teasing.  She just squeezes him harder.

 

*

 

The leg isn’t the only thing Katie’s arranged for him.  She must’ve been busy last night, he thinks, equal parts proud and exasperated because he’s going to have to do something about that, isn’t he, and god help the poor fool who tries to make Katie stop when she’s set her mind to doing something.  He’d almost rather turn himself back over to the Galra.

She’d rushed out of her hangar after looking at the portable holoprojector that she wears on her wrist (Matt has _got_ to get himself one of those), yelling “Coran is coming wait here see ya later!” as she went.  So Matt’s waiting, and obviously while he does, he pokes through Katie’s things.  There’s an awful lot of tech that he doesn’t understand, but upon closer inspection, the Altean technology is really quite intuitive.  He can’t read the script at all but for something like the 3-D copier, the function is simple enough that it’s easy to backtrace the technological pathway.  He powers up her computer, intending to do some hardcore brotherly snooping, but he stalls when the machine lights to life.  The desktop is cluttered with files, as he’d expect, but he taps a few buttons and the icons fade out and spread up in a holoscreen arc around him, and he stares at one of the projections.

It’s a picture of himself.  And Katie, with her long hair and contacts, from the night before the Kerberos launch.  He almost doesn’t recognize himself -- short, messy hair, happy grin, casual stance, small but muscular and strong.  He looks at his reflection in the metal base of the computer module, and all he sees are the foreign clothes that hang off of him like wet paper and the sallow, hollow look to his face.  He rubs at his eyes.  “I look like shit,” he mutters to himself.

“I’m unfamiliar with what this _shit_ looks like, but I must say that in overall appearance you do rather resemble the cavern waifs of Noerterys.   Not much meat on your bones there, eh, Revised Number Four?  I’ll set you up with some nunvil in just a tick, do you some good, it will, put hair on your chest and a perk in your ears!”  Coran strolls in like he owns the place -- which, Matt supposes, he more or less does, despite the fright Matt gets at the sudden interruption.  Coran gives Matt another critical once-over, clucks his tongue like a concerned uncle, and proceeds to flap his arms, chivvying Matt out of the hangar.  “Come on, now, come on, things to do, places to go!  Pidge has informed me that you need external correction for an ocular deficiency, is that correct?”

“I -- yeah.”  Matt blinks, half-distracted by the novelty of being able to walk easily under his own power again.  He wonders idly if there’s a machine like the cryo-pods for nearsightedness.  Space laser eye surgery.  He snickers at the idea.

Coran eyes him, no doubt thinking about what a nutjob Matt is (“Space case,” he says to himself, and laughs some more).  “Yes, well, we can’t go having that, can we? No Castle of Lions crew member can operate with such an impairment, that’s simply ridiculous.  We’ll have that sorted out, ah, lickey-spit, as Lance would say!”

Matt nearly trips over his own metal foot from laughing so hard.  This time, Coran’s moustache twitches in a way that Matt expects means he’s smiling, if the crinkles around his eyes are any indication.  The room they walk into seems vaguely familiar, and Matt sobers up quickly when he realizes it’s nearly identical to the one with the cryo-pods, with the lack of pods being the only notable omission, though after a moment he notices the hatches in the floor and figures that it’s probably the same room after all.  He hasn’t been back here since he woke up.

While Matt pokes around, Coran brings up a holoscreen and taps something into it.  “There we are!  Step right up here, my boy, that’s it, yes, now, see the blinking dots?”

Matt nods.

“Good.  Now, I want you to look at them, eyes open as far as you can --” he pauses to demonstrate, looking for all the world like a startled schnauzer, “-- and don’t blink or look away until I say so!  Now, ready?  Yes, stand right there, and in three, two, one --”

Matt opens his eyes wide, and the lights flash.  The med bay flashes, too, to the stark barrenness of the cell and back.  He sucks in a breath, willing himself to bear it, and he holds both the stare and his breath until Coran cheerfully announces that he’s done and pats him on the shoulder.  “Well done, soldier,” he says, more seriously than Matt has come to expect from him.  Matt swallows past the sudden lump in his throat and nods his thanks.  Coran squeezes his shoulder, then tactfully turns away to allow Matt a moment to compose himself.  He scratches at his palm, but the scab doesn’t bleed.

“There we are,” Coran narrates as he types.  “The occs will be ready in about four dobashes.  That’ll give us a moment to talk, it will.”  He turns and fixes Matt with a narrow-eyed stare.  Matt gulps reflexively and hunches his shoulders.


	18. Chapter 18

“What are occs?” Matt hedges, as the console starts up a low humming.  Whatever this talk is going to be, Matt is certain he wants no part of it, and Coran, from his observations, seems the type to be easily distracted.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that.  “Ocular correctors,” Coran answers, bouncing up onto his toes, “like our Pidge wears, though nothing so primitive in design, of course.  Your species seems to have an unusually high requirement for them, on Altea they were typically only worn by the very elderly and soldiers who were wounded by laser blasts.  Ah!  Memories!  But your biological deficiencies aside,” he adds, getting serious again, “you must tell me about your abilities.”

“My what?”  Matt stiffens in alarm.  What abilities?

Coran spreads his arms wide.  “What can you contribute to our fight with the Galra, hm?  We need our paladins, of course, but you’re the only other human we have come across, thus far, and quite honestly I'm not certain what use you can be.  As they say, there is no curbackle for a Bendaff Sor!” which Matt interprets to be an Altean equivalent of “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Matt takes a deep breath.  “I’m a scientist,” he says, standing at attention.  The familiar pose helps him focus, to get in the right mindset.  He feels like he’s been put on the spot for a job interview or something, and he doesn’t like it.   And the stakes are high -- somehow, he hadn’t really considered that he’d have to earn his keep, which is stupid.  He’s stupid.  That’s the big secret, here -- surprise!  He’s actually an idiot.  He’s also going to throw up, probably, or he would if there was anything in him to vomit. Out loud, he says, “I’m a biologist and a geologist, formally, but I’m not bad at chemistry, computer science, or engineering, either.  Or any other academic area.  I mean, I’m literally a genius.  I know a lot of things.  And I’m smarter than Katie, no matter what she thinks.”  And then, because his heart is racing and he can’t really think beyond the worst possible result, he adds, in a small, pathetic voice, “Please don’t throw me off the ship.”

Coran looks shocked at the suggestion.  “Goodness, no, whatever gave you the impression I would do such a thing?”  

Because I’m not useful, Matt doesn’t say.  He’s uncomfortably aware that for all his resume is impressive, he has no idea if he’s actually capable of performing any sort of beneficial work at all, right now.  His last greatest achievement was breaking his own leg so that he could sort of walk on it.  Not exactly Nobel-level work, there.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Coran says in response to Matt’s non-answer.  “I merely want to know where you might best be of use to us.  As you may be aware, we are rather, ah, understaffed, at the moment.  Biologist, you say?  Good, good, we could use a medic with knowledge of human anatomy, goodness knows I don’t have a clue.  And I’m not even a medic!”

Matt flashes back to the months spent in the mines, having every minor injury thrown at him and every sick alien coming to him for help.  He can’t remember the number of times he’s had to say that he can’t do anything, he doesn’t have any real medical training, that, “I’m not that kind of doctor, Commander, sorry.”

“And I was never really a Commander, either,” Coran says, voice gentle.  The computer module beeps, and a panel opens in the side.  Coran removes a ring of transparent glass, wide and flat on one side and tapering to almost nothing on the other, and he places it carefully around Matt’s head like a crown.  It hovers over Matt’s eyes -- he can feel the tapered ends touching the back of his head if he focuses on it, but otherwise there’s nothing.  And for the first time in more than two years, Matt can _see_.  He sighs in relief, one of those deep sighs that come straight from the soul, and the corners of Coran’s eyes crinkle again.  Now that Matt can see him properly, he looks tired. Exhausted. Not just the kind of exhaustion that comes from not sleeping enough, although that’s almost certainly the case as well, but the kind that comes from having to fight and fight just to stay afloat.  Red Queen.  Running and running just to stay in place.  And Matt knows what that kind of exhaustion feels like.  He feels a twinge of sympathy.  

“We all must do what we can, though, mustn’t we?” Coran puts his hands on Matt’s shoulders, and Matt abruptly misses his dad, feels the characteristic sting of guilt that accompanies that thought.  He takes a deep breath and nods.

“Let’s get to work, then,” Matt says, trying to shift the track of his thoughts.  “Show me how these pod things work.  And I’m gonna need to learn to read, uh, Altean, if I’m going to be any use here, so we should probably start there.  And maybe --”

Coran holds up a hand, cutting him off.  There’s a frown line between his eyebrows and his moustache twitches.  “Hold on a tick there, what do you mean about learning to read?  The other humans are perfectly capable of reading, is it an advanced skill on your planet?  That doesn’t say much for your culture, does it?”

Matt squints in confusion.  “No?  But I don’t speak whatever language that is.  I’m pretty limited to Earth languages,” he says wryly.

Coran flaps a hand at him.  “No no, of course you don’t speak Altean, but the translation algorithms in the castle’s ambient programming should allow you to read the text, or at least to interpret the script, at any rate -- oh!”  He smacks his own forehead, and Matt jumps a little.  “Of course!  That should have been as obvious as a Gibberlak in the mud, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before now.  Show me your neck,” he demands.

“Uh.  Why?”  Matt hunches his shoulders protectively, but Coran grabs them and spins him around with surprising ease.  He taps a finger at the base of Matt’s skull, and Matt flinches.

“Just as I suspected!”  Coran declares.  “The castle’s algorithms are being overridden by a Galra translation implantation, I can see the scar here.  They function well enough for spoken communication, but our programs are much more advanced, the translation is much smoother and it doesn’t produce the same level of feedback.  Far superior to the Galra model.  Er, well, that’s according to what Shiro’s said, anyway.  We had the same problem with him as well.  I thought he was just a dunce, at first, if you’d believe that!”

Matt tries to follow this, and tries harder to not be freaked out by the fact that he has a Galra device embedded in his skull that he didn’t even know about.  He doesn’t do a very good job, and tunes Coran out as he tries to work himself down from a mounting panic attack.  He’s clenching his fists and releasing them according to a slow rhythm, and times his breathing to match, but he’s acutely aware of the tingling numbness of his left hand ring and pinky fingers and every dulled sensation is a reminder of the Galra.  It’s not working.  It’s not working.

He feels a sudden, pinpoint pain at the back of his head, and he jumps, briefly distracted.  “What was that?” he yelps, clapping a hand over his neck and staring wide-eyed at Coran.

Coran holds up a small handheld device.  It looks superficially similar to an otoscope, and there’s a short, silvery needle stuck askew to the end of it.  “There we are!” he says cheerily.  “Now the castle’s translation program should kick in, it doesn’t require a physical transmitter in the body.  Such a barbaric practice, _really_.”

Matt reaches, and Coran lets him take the little chip and roll it around on his palm.  It’s barely a centimeter long and no thicker than a hair.  “That’s it?” he asks, just to be sure.

Coran confirms it.  “That’s it.  Do you hear me any differently?”

Matt starts to shake his head, but then he realizes the high-pitched, ever-present humming is gone.  He spins to look at the holoscreens, and realizes that he can make out the words now.  Some of them are still unfamiliar, which he supposes makes sense for things like proper names and jargon that don’t translate well, anyway, but at least he can grasp the general meaning of the data output.

“That’ll help,” he says, leaning forward to stare at a screen showing some kind of menu for the cryo-pods, and he grins when he realizes that its settings basically come down to manual input or automatic sensing.  “Automatic space popsicle-maker and defroster, huh.  Looks simple enough.”  He starts poking around the menus and playing with the settings, making the pods raise out of the floor and activate, then deactivate, and inputting instructions for various types and intensities of treatments.

One of the screens he finds is a data log.  Out of curiosity, he opens the most recent log and skims over the information.  There’s a list of damages, broken down into categories of “Repaired” or “Insufficient Treatment”, and a Vitruvian Man model of his own body, complete with his frankly horrifying nest of hair, with injuries traced in glowing colour.  He starts with the repaired list, by far the longer of the two -- a score of “superficial wound, contusion”s, “superficial wound, abrasion”s, and “superficial wound, laceration,”s, followed by a long list of increasingly-severe injuries, culminating in a pair of “burn, severe”s and three “fracture, simple”s.  It’s surreal, reading such an impersonal list of his own injuries, and he feels himself floating within his own mind, losing focus.

The “Insufficient Treatment” list is shorter, and far more difficult to look at.  Every impersonal descriptor is like a punch to the stomach.

Nerve damage: partial healing

Nerve damage: partial healing

Cerebral damage: partial healing

Neural dysfunction: no healing

Appendage loss: no healing

“Neural dysfunction,” he repeats to himself, gripping the sides of the module with white fingers. The muscles in his left hand twitch and loosen.  Nerve damage.  He grits his teeth.

“The pods don’t fix everything,” Coran says.  It’s cautious, like he’s waiting for Matt’s reaction.  Matt’s waiting for his reaction, too.  He doesn’t really know what to feel. “They accelerate natural healing while preventing further damage, it’s an imperfect science, to be sure.”  He reaches for Matt’s left hand, and after Matt’s initial, instinctive flinch, he holds it gently between his own hands, fingertips pressed into the scar tissue at his wrist.  Matt breathes carefully, slowly, through his mouth.  “Ah, I do wish we’d gotten you out of there sooner,” he sighs.

“It’s fine,” Matt answers automatically.  Can’t think about that.  He just… can’t.  His eyes flicker back to the holoscreen.

“Wait, what’s that?” he asks, not really expecting an answer, and he leans forward for a better look, pulling his hand away from Coran.  Beside the list of injuries, he sees a recommended incubation time of two quintents.  Along with a record of the manual override that kept him in the pod for some 50 vargas longer than the necessary period, which, if he calculates that out using the conversion estimators Katie informed him of, amounts to around two days.  “What’s this?” he repeats.

Coran’s moustache twitches nervously.  “That was Hunk’s idea!” he says, quick to deflect blame.  Matt glances at him briefly, then goes back to staring at the module and rubbing at his wrists.  “He didn’t want you to come out of cryo before Lance.  You were… distraught, and seemed very concerned about him.  We thought it would be to everyone’s benefit if Lance was there waiting when you woke up,” Coran adds, and as much as Matt bristles at having that control taken away from him… if he looks at it objectively, it’s a good call.  Even with Lance there, someone familiar and expected and safe, one of the first things he’d done was fall backwards into a flashback.  So yeah, it was probably a good idea.  For the best.  

Sure, that’s easy enough to say.  He’s still peeved.

Matt interrupts Coran before he can continue speaking.  “It’s fine, whatever.”  Even though it’s not.  He shakes his head.  “Let’s not talk about it.  Gimme some blueprints. Code.  You’ve got schematics for these things, right?”

It’s much easier to not think of things when he has something else to focus on.  He turns off the data log and sets about exploring the different functions and modalities of the healing pods, and it’s a relief to lose himself in work again.  

And that becomes the new day-to-day of Matt’s life in space.  He spends most of his time studying the healing pods, and when he’s gleaned as much as he thinks he can from that, he moves on to the Altean first aid kits and medications, learning the purpose behind everything and cataloging their best uses and closest Earth analogues, to the best of his ability.  Katie shows him how to use the wrist-mounted holo-interfaces, which he swiftly decides are the best part about space, because it’s all the convenience of a computer, but it’s much lighter and it makes him feel like Iron Man.

“More like Cyclops, with the glasses,” Katie points out.  “And on that note, why didn’t I get a cool space visor?”

“Snooze ya lose,” Matt says to that, poking at the side of the occs like he’d always done to bump his glasses into place -- it’s unnecessary, with the occs, since they hover in exactly the right place no matter what he’s doing, but considering that he’d managed to keep the habit over two glasses-less years in Galra captivity, he has no expectation that he’s ever going to stop.  He’s definitely keeping the occs, though.  They’re brilliant.  Possibly in his top five things he likes about space.  “Go lose your glasses on some ice moon somewhere, maybe then Coran’ll make you a pair of these bad boys.”

“Oh please.  If I was out on an ice moon, I’d be wearing my _super high tech_ paladin armour, I wouldn’t need my glasses.”

Matt has to concede that round to her.


	19. Chapter 19

Matt delves into his new role with relish, though he balks at being referred to as the medic.  He prefers to call himself the Biological Support officer.  BS officer for short. It’s appropriate and hilarious and it makes Lance and Katie laugh.  While he studies, if the paladins aren’t busy he can usually convince Lance to stay and hang out with him, or he’ll bring his material to wherever Coran is doing things, so that he can pester him about the terminology and the veracity of the old textbooks and the primary sources for the information.  And because Coran is their support commander, it means that Matt ends up going to watch the paladins train, sometimes.  It is interesting, but watching them fight, even if it’s just sparring against each other or the programmable drone, still makes him uneasy.  Especially when it’s Katie or Shiro.   _Especially_ when it’s Katie and Shiro fighting each other, no matter how much Katie seems to enjoy that.  He still can’t stomach the food goo, but Hunk usually makes at least one edible meal a day, so Matt subsists off of those.  And nunvil.  He doesn’t understand why the others have such a strong aversion to the stuff, it’s definitely something of an acquired taste but now that he’s acquired it, Matt’s a fan.  Though pointing out that it has properties reminiscent of caffeine when it’s heated up does draw the interests of both Shiro and Katie.

All in all, Matt’s life is looking up, things are great, he’s not a slave, he can usually keep the panic attacks and-slash-or flashbacks and-slash-or hallucinations to a minimum of one or two a day, now, which is still exhausting, but hey, at least it isn’t constant anymore.  The days are great, full of research and technology.  It’s the nights that are the problem.

He can’t stand his room.  He hates it.  Everything about it is awful, and his heart squeezes in his chest every time Hunk or Lance starts yawning and making noises about turning in for the evening.  A good number of the minor breakdowns happen in his room, unbeknownst to the others, and he’s taken to avoiding the tiny space as much as possible.  Luckily for him, Katie rarely sleeps in her room, either, and since everyone expects them to be practically joined at the hip anyway, it’s incredibly easy for him to just lurk around her hangar and work on their projects until Katie passes out.

Matt’s current pet project is a new leg, born of a conversation he’d had with Katie and Hunk.  Well, mostly Hunk.

“Just think of the possibilities!” Hunk had said, eyes sparkling and hands clasped in pure excitement.  “‘Cause Shiro’s arm doesn’t come off, right, it’s way more hardwired into his biology, real sophisticated stuff.  We’ve poked around inside it -- me and Pidge -- and it’s super complicated.  But yours is more basic -- um, no offense?  But that means we can totally swap it out with something else!  We can build you a new leg.  Or, like, a whole _bunch_ of new legs, and you can, like, change them out and stuff.  Like picking your weapon for battle or whatever.  It’ll be fun.  I already have a few ideas for designs to show you, if you want to see?”

“Hunk,” Matt had interrupted, as Katie failed to stifle a giggle.  “Who exactly do you think you’re talking to?”  He’d pointed at himself, one eyebrow raised in the most deliberately supercilious expression he could muster.

“Uh.  You’re Pidge’s brother…?  I-I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

“You ever heard of the Garrison’s Matrix Expanding-Transmission Arm/Leg Link-Integrated Cerebral Application prosthetics?”

Katie rolled her eyes and muttered, “Here we go,” in the background, while Hunk had just blinked and said, “The METALLICA line?  Yeah, of course, we did a case study on them in my intro to bioengineering class, why?”

Matt smirked.  “I designed those.  I think I can manage to build a leg myself.”

Hunk had screeched and bombarded him with questions that Matt was only too happy to answer.  He always did like having an audience to his genius, after all.  Somehow, that had turned into the three of them entering into a competition to design and build the best replacement leg.  Matt’s pretty sure he’s going to win, but that’s mostly an effect of also being the judge.  When it comes down to it, he gets three new legs made by three expert engineers, and he’s pretty pleased with that.  

Katie’s being frustratingly secretive about hers, though.

“Come oooon, Katie,” he wheedles, trying to peer over her shoulder as she works on a microchip.  She keeps spinning in her chair, though, and he can’t get more than a glimpse.  She kicks him on his natural shin as she spins, and he’s pretty certain it’s intentional.  “Ow.  Rude.  Kaaatie, show me!  It’s going to be attached to my body anyway, c’mon!”

“Nope.”  She pops the ‘p’ and shoves off the floor, rolling away across the room without ever looking up from her chip.  Matt drops dramatically onto the pile of pillows they’d dragged up together from one of the many stuffy storage rooms a few days after he’d come out of cryo, sighing as loudly and obnoxiously as he possibly can.  

“Betrayal,” he moans.  “Betrayal from my own dear little sister!  My heart is broken!  How could you be so cruel to me, your long-lost, crippled brother?”  He rolls around in the cushions, groaning and carrying on as dramatically as he can manage, and Katie does what is admittedly an admirable job of ignoring him.  He’d thought she might be out of practice, after nearly three years, but then he remembers that she spends a lot of time around Lance.  No wonder her mental barriers are still so strong.  

After a few minutes of this, Matt finds a comfortable position and just lies there, staring up at the ceiling of the hangar.  It wavers, a little, and he rubs his eyes.  God, he needs to sleep.  But the idea of going back to his cell of a room, alone, makes his skin crawl, and he slaps half-heartedly at a solitary green octopede that appears on his knee. Sure enough, it vanishes.

Katie starts humming quietly as she works, and the sound of it lulls Matt into a sleepy torpor.  He wraps up in a blanket like a burrito and pushes the occs off the top of his head so he can smush his face into the cushions.  He drifts through his own mind, watching himself working in the Kerberos shuttle, organizing ice cores and entering his data logs.  He remembers the taste of freeze-dried peas, sitting squashed in the slightly-too-small bench seat between Shiro and his dad, in the middle because he’s the smallest, countering that his elbows are also the pointiest.  The interior of the shuttle swirls around him and then he’s in the cell on the mining colony, the big one with the barred doors, shared with his dad and three other aliens, all tired and sore but still able to find points of brightness with each other.  He remembers laughing.  His own laughter echoes in his skull and he twists in the blankets.

He hears footsteps, and it cuts through the echoed laughter, breaking it up into discrete chunks.  “Hey Pidge,” Shiro’s voice says, and Matt hadn’t realized Katie was still humming until she stops.

“Hey,” she says, soft, and there’s a faint rustling sound and Matt hears quiet breathing close by.

“He asleep?”  

He doesn’t hear Katie’s answer, but after a moment Matt feels a gentle, tentative touch on his arm, and the blankets are drawn up around his shoulders and tucked around his feet.  He thinks about his dad, and his mom, and he wonders vaguely where he is, if he’s at home.  The hands smooth over his shoulders again, one soft and warm and one hard and quietly whirring, and he curls up under the touch.

“Good,” he hears Shiro say.  “He looks…” he trails off.

“Mm, yeah, I know,” Katie says.  “I don’t know how much sleep he actually gets, I’m pretty sure he’s never gone to bed before me and I’m not exactly a paragon of good sleep cycles.”

A wry, “Look who you’re talking to.”  

Katie chuckles quietly, then says, “Okay, stop being creepy, let him sleep.”

“M’not asleep,” Matt mumbles, just to be obstinate.  He doesn’t move or open his eyes -- that is, until Katie heaves a gusty sigh and he flinches and opens one eye to glare balefully at her.

“Well, you should be,” Katie retorts, jaw set and stubborn.

Because Matt is an adult and therefore much more mature than his little sister, he sticks out his tongue and flops over to shove his face in a pillow so he can’t see Katie’s retaliation.  So there.  He wins.  

“Why aren’t you sleeping well?” Shiro says, affecting a light gentleness that makes Matt feel like a little kid.  

The sleepiness has taken the precautionary edge off of Matt, so he answers honestly before he can remember to censor himself.  “Hafta sleep at all before it can be ‘well’,” he says, and Shiro sighs.

“Matt…” he starts, which Matt roundly ignores, because it’s not like Shiro has any place to talk.  Matt knows about his sleep habits -- or lack thereof.  Really, it’s pretty hypocritical of Shiro and Katie, of all people, to be attempting to police his sleep schedule.

It’s probably because he’s so pathetic.  Everyone wants to take care of the poor, traumatized, half-starved ex-POW.  Ugh, no thanks.  Matt’s perfectly fine being independently dysfunctional, as a matter of fact, he doesn’t need the pitying looks or the awkward silences when he walks into a room.  It makes him feel like a pariah.  

He slowly realizes that someone is stroking through his hair, soft and gentle, and he wants to protest but it reminds him so much of his mother that he reels with it. Exhaustion is making him dull -- well, he already knew that would happen, it’s not like he’s slept well in, oh, the last three years.  Mental faculties much diminished, here.  He shifts vaguely in the blanket nest but as a protest, it’s half-hearted at the absolute best.  

“Go to sleep, idiot,” Katie says above him, exasperated and fond.  

“Hn,” he mumbles in reply, lulled by Katie’s slow touches.  She pauses, and he feels her hand just brushing the top of his hair, but his heart stutters and skips a beat.  “Don’t go,” he asks -- _begs_ , almost, pleads -- and he registers dimly that he’ll probably be embarrassed about that later.

In a strange-sounding voice, Katie promises, “I won’t,” and Matt wants to tell her… something…

He falls asleep before he can do much more than wonder vaguely what it is he’s forgotten to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have no idea how long I've been gleefully awaiting the moment I could post the METALLICA joke.


	20. Chapter 20

The next thing Matt knows he’s screaming awake in a flurry of cushions, the hangar faintly lit with grey-green light.  He panics, fighting the twisted-up blankets until he falls out of his nest and hits the floor with a thump.  His heart’s pounding, jumping into his throat, and he doesn’t remember the dream at all and starts to scream again before his brain catches up with him.  He chokes it back, swallowing heavily.

Something shifts and sighs close to his head, and he bites down on a shriek as he scrambles away, on hands and ankles like a crab.  It’s only Katie, though, frowning in her sleep and her fingers reaching slowly to pull up her blankets.  “Matt?” she mumbles, and he has the doomsday feeling that he’s done something embarrassing that he can’t remember.  

“It’s fine, Katie,” he says, even though his hands are shaking and he feels cold and hot all at once and everything that’s the opposite of _fine_.  “Sorry I woke you up.”

“S’okay.  You okay?”

“Mm.”  No.  “I’m just gonna… go to the bathroom.”  And he does, throwing up the remains of a meagre dinner, but he doesn’t return, after, instead wandering out into the castle.  It’s his new nightly habit.  He avoids the training and observation decks -- that’s _Shiro’s_ habit -- but everywhere else is fair game, and tonight, he ends up with a mugful of nunvil, curled up like a pillbug at one of the counter surfaces, trying not to freak out until the morning alarm sounds and the rest of the castle’s inhabitants file in for a breakfast of green goop (which Matt, for his part, refuses).  He falls asleep beside Katie at the counter, waking in time to send the paladins off for training, and thus begins an embarrassing tradition of Matt nodding off during group gatherings, exhaustion finally getting the best of him, whether it be at meals or watching individual training or in communal downtime in one of the many lounges.  It’s a pretty stupid system, honestly, but it’s the only way he manages to get any sleep at all, so for now, he’ll deal with it.  Panic attacks and flashbacks by night, catnaps by day.  He’s like the universe’s lamest superhero.  

Matt becomes one big ball of self-sabotaging positive feedback, looping around and around and he knows he’s making things worse, he’s aware, but he can’t stop it.  The exhaustion and flashbacks make him irritable, which, on top of what he’s been reliably informed is a generally difficult personality, makes him prone to snapping at the paladins.  Coran and Allura have enough alienness and authority about them that Matt can’t help but be a little wary of drawing their ire, but everyone else is, apparently, fair game.  Katie gives back as good as she gets, at least, though Matt doesn’t miss the little flashes of hurt and confusion before she insults him right back.  It can’t be long before they all hate him, Matt thinks.  He hates himself, too, but he does it anyway.  Because he has great survival instincts, apparently.  He’s lucky Allura hasn’t thrown him out an airlock yet.

He also develops the habit, during the long, terrifying nights alone, of going to the paladin’s residential hallway, just to check that they’re still there.  That they exist at all. Even Keith, who hasn’t really warmed up to Matt all that much since their initial meeting, though Matt can’t really blame him when the majority of their interactions end with Matt either passing out on any vaguely horizontal surface, or making some pointed, snarky comment.  Keith’s too serious -- it’s so easy to poke at him, and Matt really can’t help it.  Shiro’s room is empty more often than not, during Matt’s crepuscular creeping, which Matt has mixed feelings about.  Things are still weird, between them. Matt’s little freakout didn’t make things better, and he’s always been allergic to manly emotions anyway, crazy brain crap aside.  The last thing Matt wants is for Shiro to realize he’s sneaking around all night watching them sleep and get creeped out.  The second-last thing Matt wants is for Shiro to realize he’s sneaking around all night and want to have a _talk_ about it.  

Keith’s door is always locked when he’s inside, as is Katie’s, but Hunk and Lance, both the heaviest sleepers and most open and trusting of the paladins, tend to leave theirs open.  Which goes an embarrassingly long way towards soothing Matt’s misplaced midnight anxiety, giving him access to peek in on them like a helicopter parent and make sure they’re okay.  That they exist.

Until the evening when Matt presses the panel to open Lance’s door, only to find Lance awake and reading something off of his pad.  They both jump, Matt a little more violently, and he lingers in the door, trying to think of a plausible excuse and coming up blank.

“Uh.  Wanna explain?”  Lance says.  He sounds a little wary but mostly curious, which at the least is better than the anger Matt is expecting.

Matt may or may not have yelled at Hunk for asking why Matt didn’t eat any of the dinner he’d made.  There was some kind of purple tuber on top, something that Lance and Hunk in particular seemed to enjoy, but just the sight of it had made Matt want to throw up.  His skin had been crawling all day, he’d been seeing Galra and octopedes everywhere, and completely at his wits’ end, so instead of a simple lie (“I’m not hungry”), he’d snapped and insulted everything from Hunk’s cooking to his floppy hair to the colour of his lion.

Yelling at Hunk is like kicking a puppy.  Matt had tripped over the stool in his haste to get away and then stumble-run deep into the labyrinthine corridors of the castle.  He hasn’t seen anyone else all evening.  His body feels like it's being scratched all over and Matt wishes heartily that he could just crawl out of his skin.

“No,” Matt replies honestly.  He gets a tired grin in response.

“Just checking in?”  Lance asks, and when Matt stays silent, he adds, “it’s fine, Shiro does it all the time, too.  Doesn’t bother me.”  

“You’re usually asleep at this time,” Matt says, and Lance squints at him.

”But you’re not?  That’s… man, Shiro’s a great guy and an awesome leader and all but this really isn’t the trait you should be emulating.  C’mere,” he adds, sitting up and patting the bed beside him.  Matt hesitates for another moment, but then gives in and goes to tuck himself into the little cubby bed.  Lance has piled it with as many extra blue blankets as he’s been able to get his hands on, and Matt curls the bare toes of his natural leg into the soft coverings.  Lance wiggles around, pulling the blankets with him until he’s propped up against the wall beside Matt.  He wraps one blanket tight around his own shoulders, and he reaches to tuck another around both of their legs, warming the little space with their shared body heat until Matt’s toes prickle with being rewarmed.  

“That’s why you’re always taking those little catnaps everywhere, huh?  Man, at least one of you has the sense to do that much.”  Lance leans his shoulder against Matt’s. “Why don’t you just sleep at night, though?”

Matt ignores the question.  “Aren’t you mad at me?” he blurts out.

“What?” Lance blinks, tilts his head to one side.  “Why?”

Matt shrugs and tucks his chin into a blanket.  “Because Hunk.”

“Oh.  Well.  I dunno.  That was pretty uncalled for, but like, we sort of expect it.”  Something sharp and rotten twists around Matt’s stomach.  Definition of a loose cannon, he thinks.  Unpredictable, uncontrollable, dangerous.  Boom, watch him explode.  Lance continues; “I mean, nobody should be mean to Hunk, Hunk’s like a giant marshmallow and everyone loves marshmallows, but like. We know you didn’t mean it.”

“What if I did?” Matt asks, not wanting to know the answer.

Lance hums and bumps Matt’s knee with his own.  “Did you?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”  And isn’t that the crux of the issue.  Matt doesn’t know anything anymore.

“Well.  I don’t think you did.”  Lance’s tone is so effortlessly confident that Matt stares at him.  With a nudge and a crooked grin, Lance adds, “I know you.  So do Pidge and Shiro, obviously.  You’re not mean.  Like, you’re not a bad person, right?  So it’s fine.  I mean, not _fine_ , but.  We get it.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, and Lance's head starts nodding.  Every time he blinks it takes another second longer for his eyes to open again.  Matt watches with trepidation.  He doesn’t want Lance to fall asleep.  He can’t -- Matt takes a few long, measured breaths, fisting his hands in the blankets and squeezing hard.  “Hey, Lance?”

He gets a sleepy, muffled sound in acknowledgement.

“You’re an extrovert,” Matt says, thinking out loud.

Lance blinks slowly, his eyes reflecting the dim blue lighting of his room.  “Uh, yeah?  So?”

Because Matt doesn’t get it.  He’s never been a “people person”, he’s always preferred to exist just with his own company.  “The rest of us are a bunch of introverts, though,” he adds.  His fingers curls and shake.  Breath in, and out..

Sighing, Lance plonks his forehead down onto Matt’s shoulder.  “Don’t remind me,” he grumbles.  “All you nerds with your _alone time_ …” he mutters under his breath for a few minutes, and Matt grins a little, distracted.  He’s obviously hit a sore spot.

The smile only lasts a moment or two, though, and slips away as Matt stares at the door.  “How do you do it?”

Lance looks at him.  “Do what?”

Matt wiggles his toes, first one foot, then the other, and he draw his knees up to wrap his arms around them.  “How do you deal with needing to be around people who don’t want you around?”  Lance is quiet, and it takes a moment, but then Matt realizes his wording and tries to backtrack.  “Wait, no, that’s not what I meant --”

“I know,” Lance says softly.  “I just… do.  I mean, what other option is there?  Hunk is really good about letting me hang around while he’s working or cooking or whatever, and there’s always Coran.  And you, now.  And like, I sometimes go do extra training with Keith or Shiro if I really need it…” he trails off, shrugging.  “It sucks, but, I can take it.  And at least when we’re training or practicing with Voltron or whatever we’re all together, so that’s fine.  It’s just the parts in between that can be a bit... frustrating.”   

“Frustrating,” Matt repeats, talking to his knees, and he giggles.  Yeah, frustrating is a word for it.  He’s frustrated.  Everything is frustrating.

“Did you know phobias can sometimes come from trauma?” Matt asks.  He can practically see the wheels in Lance’s head turning as he tries to shift tack from their previous topic.  “Sometimes they’re just irrational -- well, all phobias are irrational, that’s literally the definition, but sometimes there’s no real underlying reason.  Like, I knew a guy at the Garrison who was completely terrified by birds even though he’d never been attacked by one or seen a Hitchcock movie or anything, he was just completely phobic of birds.  But when they come up later, they’re usually a reaction to... something.”  Matt stops talking, and takes a few deep, measured breaths, timing himself against Lance. Lance just waits, pressing a little bit closer to Matt’s side and staring ahead with a serious expression while he waits for Matt to collect himself.  Matt is wordlessly appreciative and doesn’t know how to express that, so he doesn’t.  He just takes big gulps of air and wills himself to calm down.

“Ever heard of monophobia?” he finally asks.  

Lance looks at him out of the corner of his eye and shakes his head.  “If that’s the fear of Monopoly, though, I totally get you, I made Pidge play with me and Hunk at the Garrison once, and --” he breaks off in an exaggerated shudder, and Matt is startled into a short laugh.

“Oh man, it’s been so long since I played board games with Katie, she’s still…?”

“Evil?”  Lance supplies, and Matt muffles a snort in his knees.

”Wasn’t the word I was gonna use but yeah, that’s probably more accurate.”

“Tiny but terrifying,” Lance agrees, leaning hard against Matt.  Matt retaliates, and they get into a very mature shoving match that only ends when they’re both giggling and so tangled in the blankets they can barely move.  Lance gets Matt in a headlock and rests his chin on top of Matt’s head, and Matt just breathes, listening to their overlapping heartbeats.  He’s warm.

“Fear of being alone.”  It’s easier to say it, when he isn’t.

“You’re not,” Lance says, with a stubborn cast to his voice that Matt swears he must have picked up from Katie.  “You don’t have to be.”

And Matt _knows_ that, but -- phobia.  Irrational.  It’s a lot easier to tell himself that he’s being stupid than it is to actually do anything about it.  Especially when… what can he even do?  He already attaches himself to Katie or Coran every waking moment he has, but he’s also in the somewhat unique position of needing to be alone for his sanity -- tenuous though it may be -- and needing to not be alone for the same reason.  He’s glad, beyond happy, to see Katie again, and to know that she’s happy and successful and all those good things, but.  They’re not exactly close in age.  He loves her and he knows the sentiment is returned but they’ve never spent this much time so close together in their lives and it’s grating on both of them, however much they don’t want to admit it.

Frustrating.  

“This isn’t fair,” he says to the darkness.  The world -- universe -- has proven to him over and over that it’s not fair, but even still, it feels like Matt’s getting more than his share of shittiness.  His breath catches when the room flickers purple and he sees the red glow of Galra drone arrow-eyes every time he blinks.  His heart beats faster, and then he can see the drone fully, handing him a sword, and hear screaming, a bloodthirsty crowd, Shiro roaring for the fight, himself on the floor and cowering in fear.  His leg hurts, even though he knows it’s not there.  He gasps a sob.  “This isn’t fair.  Why is it just me?”  Lance wraps his arms around Matt and squeezes, and the sounds of the arena fade but the nighttime lighting is still tinged purple.  “Why isn’t it like this for you or Shiro?”  He’s whining, but he doesn’t care.  This _sucks_.

“Two and a half weeks,” Lance says, and Matt shakes against him.

“What?” he sniffs.

“I asked Hunk.  That’s how long I was missing.  And they had me alone for like a day or two before they put us together and started… that.”  Matt is quiet.  “Two weeks versus almost three years.  That’s why.  And like, I've got my own...” he breaks off, shakes his head, takes a breath.  "But yeah.  That."

Matt shakes his head.  “But Shiro --”

“Shiro has all kinds of issues,” Lance interrupts him.  “Just ‘cause he’s good at hiding it doesn’t mean he isn’t having a hard time.  And the two of you should probably talk about that, because he barely tells us anything but he could talk to you.  I think it’d be really good for him.  You’re not the only one with the messed up brain, Matt.  We get it.  It sucks but… we get it.  Even Keith, probably.  You just gotta tell us what you need.”

That’s part of the problem, Matt thinks.  He doesn’t know what he needs.  He doesn’t even know what he wants.  He just know that, whatever it is, he’s not getting it.

“Seriously, dude,” Lance murmurs, rubbing his back. “Come find me any time your brain is fucking with you, you know I like your company.”

Matt growls and sniffs and he clenches his hands to stop their shaking, but it doesn’t work.  “You like any company,” he points out, and Lance just shrugs, acquiescing the point.  “I’m just so…” he tries again, and trails off, because he’s so _many_ things, and he can’t keep them straight, he can’t get his brain to work the way it’s supposed to and it hurts, it’s hard, everything was supposed to be better and it’s _not_.  “I’m tired,” he finishes lamely, and he hates the way his voice cracks.  Lance makes a quiet sound of distress and holds him tighter.  

“So sleep,” he says, like it’s that simple.  Matt’s breath is hot and heavy and bounces back against his face.

“I can’t,” he says, petulant and stubborn.  The effect is ruined a little by his not-quite-crying.

Lance leans on Matt until he yelps and they both fall over.  “There,” Lance says smugly, face nuzzled into the side of Matt’s neck.  “Try now.”

“Somehow I don’t think the problem was just being horizontal on a bed, I coulda solved that myself,” Matt grouches, and twitches when Lance blows in his ear.  

“Pessimist.”

“Realist.”

“Oh my god, dude, I’ve got training in like four hours, will you just go to sleep?”  Lance sounds exasperated but fond, and Matt appreciates the shift in tone.

“Probably not,” Matt answers, but then he wakes up after the longest uninterrupted sleep he’s had since being thrown into solitary, wrapped up around Lance, and for once he wakes up feeling warm and comfortable and safe.  

For a little while after that, Matt tries to hold out, waiting for sleep in his own room until he can't anymore and has to flee down to the paladins’ quarters.  It only takes a few nights before Matt gives up the entire charade and goes straight into Lance’s room when Shiro calls lights out -- meaning for everyone but himself, of course, the hypocrite -- ignoring the blatant expressions of surprise from the rest of the team.  Katie’s face in particular is hilarious, so Matt plays it up by hooking an arm around Lance’s neck, winking at her, and saying, “Don’t stay up too late, kid,” as they walk away together.

Both Lance and Matt burst into laughter once they’re a little ways down the hall.  Lance even doubles over, clutching his stomach as he wheezes.  “Did you see Hunk’s face!” he gasps.  “Like --” he straightens up, opening his mouth as wide as it can go and twisting his eyebrows up and together.  He holds the expression for a second before dissolving into giggles again.  

“They’ll get over it,” Matt says dismissively, waving one hand, and then he remembers Keith’s gobsmacked expression and cracks up again.  “I bet they think we’re screwing.”

“Oh, totally,” Lance agrees.  

“An understandable mistake, really.”  Matt flips his ratty hair over his shoulder -- he hasn’t quite managed to convince himself to cut it yet, not now that he has regular access to a shower and it feels soft and clean -- and he sucks in his stomach to accentuate his bony figure, sticking his metal leg out with the foot arched as best as he can. “Because I am the sexiest thing that’s ever happened to this castle.”

Lance smacks him and he nearly falls over.  “Um, excuse _you_ , second-sexiest.  At best.  Look at all this!”  He gestures broadly to his entire body.

Matt nods sagely.  “Oh, right, of course, I forgot string bean was the look of the season.”  He steps on the back of Lance’s shoe, causing Lance to trip and windmill his arms as he squawks for balance.  “So very dignified.”

Lance tugs Matt’s hair, making his head snap back and starting a pettiness war.  Matt wins (no matter what Lance says later, Matt wins) when he shoves his cold, metal foot between Lance’s thighs, under the blankets, and Lance lets out an unholy screech in response.  


	21. Chapter 21

“No, no, Katie, what is that supposed to even do?  Your code is a mess, this is ridiculous, let me fix that.”

Katie slaps his hand.  “Hey!  I hacked the Garrison with my code, it’s perfectly fine!”

“The Garrison.  Yeah, sure, because they’re the pinnacle of cybersecurity.”  Matt scoffs, and Katie gives him a lopsided grin.

“They think they are, too, that’s the funny part.”  Katie rolls her eyes, and calls Iverson a long list of things that make Matt’s big brother instincts proud.  “Never mind the fact that a ‘little girl’ managed to break into both the physical base _and_ their private computer servers three times before they banned me.”

“And then you managed to sneak into the school disguised as me.  I’m a little offended that nobody noticed I was back, actually, what the hell.  You’d think they’d remember a face like this.”  

“Remember your obnoxious attitude, maybe,” Katie snarks back.

Matt blows a raspberry at her, and she returns in kind.  He lurks over her shoulder, waiting for the moment to strike, and when she turns to look at something on the other side of the room, he shoves Katie out of the way and quickly rewrites a line of code before she can regain her balance and tase him or something.  

“Hey!” she shouts, scrambling back onto her stool.  Matt nimbly dodges the poke she aims at his ribs, and she scowls fiercely at him before turning back to her precious code. “What did you -- oh.  Um.  That makes more sense, actually.”  

Matt drapes himself over her shoulders, grinning when she squawks in protest.  She shifts a little underneath him, then goes back to typing.  Matt watches and makes approving noises as she goes.  “Fix that part there.”  He points, and she nods.  They work together in this matter for a while, but Matt is a little distracted.

“I still can’t believe they told you we crashed,” he muses out loud.  Katie’s hair tickles his cheek and he considers blowing in her ear to annoy her, but she stops typing.

“They didn’t,” she says quietly, ducking her head so that her glasses reflect the light from the screen and her eyes are hidden in the glare.

“What?”

“They didn’t tell us anything.  Mom and me.  We found out from the news like everyone else.  Two months after they lost contact.”

Matt swears, explosively.  Then he swears again, throwing in the favourite curses he picked up during his time in the Galra prisons and mines.  “That’s…”  It’s so many levels of fucked up that he doesn’t know how to put it into words.  He shuffles through emotions until he realizes that Katie’s been still, motionless under his arms the whole time. He kisses her cheek, and she jumps.  “Sorry they did that to you,” he says, in the most sincere tone he can manage.  She shrugs, in the way that even after three years Matt knows means she’s upset but doesn’t want to talk about it.  And he can be tactful, sometimes, so he backs off, both figuratively and literally, and turns to tinker with his own piece of coding, an input for the castle’s materials synthesizer -- and if that isn’t the most convenient piece of tech, he doesn’t know what is.  All he has to do is input a recipe and make sure the requisite precursors are available, and the castle can make _anything_.  Right now he’s working on a kind of synthetic skin, based around the under-armour suits the paladins wear, and also what he remembers about the chemical composition of leather and the skins they’d used for the daintier METALLICA prosthetics back home. The fact that he’s unfamiliar with a solid ninety percent of the base materials he has to work with is only a small hiccup.  He’ll figure it out. He’s made progress already.  

He heaves a quiet sigh of relief when he hears Katie start typing again.  They’re probably going to need to talk about this, too, and Matt adds it to the list.  And to the second list, the subheading of things he’d rather amputate his other leg than have an emotional, heart-to-heart talk about.

The second list is almost as long as the first.  But, well.  That’s a problem for future Matt.  Current Matt’s problem is trying to figure out how to maintain the proper level of elasticity in his composite skin.  He tries a few things and has the castle synthesize swatches, like some kind of printer.  A mental image of the castle’s synth printer jamming up like the relic in his dad’s office back on Earth makes him laugh out loud.  So many technological improvements since the first computers, and humanity has never figured out how to design a printer -- two or three-dimensional -- that doesn’t jam.  He wonders if the super-advanced Alteans ever solved that one.  At any rate, the synthesizer hasn’t frozen up on him thus far.  The castle beeps to announce that it’s done testing Matt’s next recipe, and presents him with a square-decimeter sheet of rubbery, pink-beige material.  He hums under his breath, stretching it and poking his finger into it to see how the material rebounds.

“What is that?”  Katie asks, next to his ear, and Matt shrieks in surprise and accidentally cracks his shoulder on the underside of her jaw.  She yelps, jumping back and cupping her chin with an affronted cry of, “Matt!”  

“Dammit, Katie!”  He unconsciously hunches his shoulders and pulls his hands in to protect his neck and core.  “Why are you so sneaky!”  His heart gallops in his chest and he has to take several long, steady breaths to try to calm down.

“I’m not sneaky!  You just weren’t paying attention!” she accuses, eyes watering.  “Ow,” she adds, in a disgruntled tone.

“You are so sneaky.”  Matt doesn’t remark on the second part, because it’s true -- his ability to concentrate is still stretched far too thin, and he can only focus on one thing at a time.  Even then, he often can’t focus at all, but he’d been in the zone, this time, and he grumbles a bit about the fact that he’s lost it.

“Am not!”

“Are too.”

“How old are you again?”

“Oh shut up.”

Katie’s still rubbing her jaw when she creeps back up beside him, making sure to stomp with exaggerated steps so that he hears her, and he rolls his eyes.  “I know you’re here now,” he grouses.

“What, and you didn’t before?  How could you forget a face like this?” she mimics him, and he snaps the synthetic skin against her arm in retaliation.  

She makes a face, and Matt grins.  The texture of it is super weird, but he enjoys it.  Very uncanny valley.  When it’s relaxed, it really does feel like human skin, just a little softer.  He has a sudden burst of inspiration and shoots his hand out to grab Katie’s head, rubbing her earlobe between his fingers.  Yeah, just like that.

“Get off of me, you weirdo.”  She pushes his hand away, and repeats, more insistently this time, “What _is_ that?”

“Skin,” he answers, rolling a corner between his fingers again. Still not elastic enough.  It’s still wrong.

“ _What_?”

“You heard me,” he answers.  “I’m trying to synthesize something with all the aesthetic properties of human skin, though of course it doesn’t have any of the, ah, you know, biological properties.  Except it should be pretty impermeable, when I’m done with it.  It’s not right yet though, look, when I stretch it…”  He grabs the newest swatch by the sides, stretching it over his metal leg until the skin starts pulling apart, first with small holes forming against the edges and joints in the plating at his knee.  The holes start to rip, tearing in lateral striations to expose the metal, and Matt watches it in fascination.  He can smell the infection as he pulls, and he thinks that the colours aren’t right, but he could fix that, add in the feverish reds and pale yellow undertones --

“Stop!”  Katie’s voice cuts into him, and when he blinks the smell of the dank cell disappears, and the lighting brightens out of purple into blue.  Katie is looking a little green, and she reaches with a shaky hand to take the tattered skin from him and place it gingerly on the workbench.  “I get the point,” she says.  

Matt swallows.  “Yeah.  Yeah, sorry.”  He rubs at his palm, but when he looks around everything seems normal, and he doesn’t dig into it, moving his fingers instead to massage the scar tissue at his wrist instead.  

“It’s fine,” Katie says.  She bites at her lip.  “What… what’s it for?”

She seems a little apprehensive, asking the question, but Matt doesn’t really register that.  “Oh, it’s for Shiro,” he says, offhand, squinting down at his code.  Maybe if he changes the overall thickness…

“For Shiro?”

Matt nods.  “Mm.  To cover his arm with.”  If he changes the coefficient here… he deletes and retypes a few equations,  then saves the formula and sends it to the printer.  

Katie hops up onto the workbench beside Matt’s holocomputer, peering at his work.  Her eyebrow raises when she sees the file name -- M_Holt_ProtoSynthSkin_mk47.  “How long have you been working on this?”

“Since yesterday.”  The skin comes out, but Matt can tell immediately that it’s wrong, it’s far too thick this time and much more brittle, and he immediately tosses it, makes a few notes on the file, then saves it, duplicates it, and starts poking around at the recipe again.  Mark 48.

Katie sounds a bit incredulous.  “You’ve gone through forty-seven tests since _yesterday_?”

He shrugs.  “This morning, technically, I was just working on the initial formula and learning the program yesterday, didn’t get to the first test until sometime after midnight. Relative midnight.”

She shifts, kicking her feet, and her voice sounds a little funny when she asks, “Didn’t, uh, sleep with Lance last night?”  Matt finally looks up at her, but she’s staring resolutely away, blushing faintly.  “Which is fine, it’s totally fine, you know, I mean, except it’s _Lance_ , like, you could have chosen better, but, uh…”

Matt smirks.  “Well, I can’t say I was expecting you to be jealous…”

Katie squawks and the blush spreads fully over her face.  “I --!  I’m not jealous!”  She kicks at his leg, but it’s the metal one so Matt doesn’t feel it and he just laughs at her. “You’re the worst,” she pouts.  “I’m trying to be supportive, here.”

“Sure,” Matt says in a voice dryer than the Sahara.  “Definitely feeling the support.”  Then, even though he loves getting one over on Katie every once in a while, he decides to take pity on her.  “Nah, though, it’s not that kind of sleeping together.”  She glances at him, eyes sharp, and waits for more.  He just shrugs.  “Platonic snuggling.  You should try it sometime.  Good for those prickly edges.”

She rises to the bait, as he’d known she would, and huffs, “I’m not prickly.”

“Are too.”

“You’re seven years older than me, stop acting like a little kid.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

She groans and throws up her hands in exasperation.

*

Matt may not have all of the lights on in his attic, but he’s still a scientist, and he still notices things.  Being nosy helps, too, but again -- scientist.  It’s practically his job to be nosy.  And one thing he’s noticed is that Shiro seems to have a lot of issues with his arm.

He should be able to relate, but honestly?  Of all the shit the Galra did to him, giving him a new leg to replace the one that was killing him doesn’t really rank among the worst.  He hates the fact that he got hurt and infected and gangrenous in the first place, but since it happened, at least this is a solution.  If he can’t have his own leg, he might as well have a replacement that works.  And his little competition with Katie and Hunk is actually a lot of fun.  Good bonding time for the mechanics of Team Voltron. They both put parts of their personalities and their specialties as paladins into the legs, intentionally or not -- Hunk’s is shaping up to be bulky and strong, fairly basic but solid.  Reliable, and simple.  Not necessarily weaponized, but it’s responsive and definitely rugged, and Matt anticipates it’ll be good for the exploring that the paladins (apparently) do on alien planets.  It’s a leg for bushwhacking and swashbuckling.

Katie’s, on the other hand, is definitely a leg for fighting, and Matt suspects that she modelled it heavily after her bayard, after Matt expressed his admiration of it after sitting in on a combat-based training session.  It’s lightweight and packed with all sorts of hidden features -- Matt is particularly partial to the ankle blades and the the little cannon in the knee.  And she still hasn’t let him look at the code or the inside at all, so who knows what else will be in there.  The closest Matt’s ever come to any kind of battle training was a kickboxing class Shiro convinced him to join to get in shape before Kerberos (it was a complete disaster, and that’s all Matt has to say about that), and having a minor breakdown in the tunnel outside of the Galra gladiator arena.  So he’s not really sure why Katie thinks he’d be any use at all in battle, weaponized leg or not, but he’s a little flattered.  And he’s excited to play with the leg.

He wonders what his own design says about him, but he’s not really capable of that level of introspection at the moment.

All in all, though, he’s pretty much accepted his cybernetic enhancements.  Besides, he’d modified the shocks on Katie’s original bouncy leg and now wears it sometimes just for the simple pleasure of being able to call it his peg leg.  It’s great for the space pirate aesthetic.  All he needs now is some kind of cool space parrot and to commandeer a ship.  A space ship.

Shiro, on the other hand, doesn’t seem super happy about his Winter Soldier upgrade, which Matt supposes he can understand.  He doesn’t know the context of how Shiro lost his original arm, beyond assuming that it had happened in the gladiator arenas.  Shiro gets quiet and uncomfortable when any attention’s drawn to it, so Matt hasn’t asked him, and trying to snoop around behind Shiro’s back hadn’t helped, either.  The most insightful answer had come from Keith, and that had been, “Nobody knows except Shiro and he doesn’t want to talk about it, so leave him alone.”

Matt had made some comment about Keith being a well-trained little pitbull, and then he’d had to call off his own guard dog in Katie when she’d jumped on Keith for his aggressive response to Matt’s taunt.  This castle ship is pretty overrun with overprotective little siblings, he realizes.

But anyway.  Matt thinks that maybe if Shiro’s arm looks and outwardly feels more like a human arm, he’ll stop being so skittish about it.  Maybe he won’t stop himself when he goes to pat someone on the shoulder or ruffle Keith’s hair or help his paladins up with they get knocked over during training if Matt can make his hand warm and soft like it should be.

Matt refuses to acknowledge that he’s blatantly hoping to circumvent any kind of actual talk with Shiro by making him a present.  If it works...

It just might be a little harder to come up with an appropriate formula than he’d thought, that’s all.  Number sixty-three goes right into the incinerator.  He mutters under his breath, and the spike of anger breaks his concentration.  He abruptly realizes that he’s alone, and his skin prickles all over his body.  He thinks about ripping it all off, able to picture it vividly after so many of the synthetic skin stretch tests.  Usually he’s okay, being alone in Katie’s hangar.  Katie attributes it to her lion ship, which Matt thinks is more than a little hokey.  In his estimation, it’s probably because there are traces of Katie everywhere, so much so that it’s hard to imagine being alone in the space even when she’s not there.  At the very least, one of her little robots will be on and blinking at him.  But when it breaks through like this, going anywhere else is probably a better idea than self-flaying, especially if he can find Lance or Coran and get them talking about something.  The paladins are probably done with whatever training they’re doing today, or maybe taking a break.  At the very least, he can go bother Allura while she watches them.  She clicks her tongue a lot, when the paladins train together, and to Matt’s great delight it really ruffles her feathers when he imitates it, but she can’t seem to stop.  It’s hilarious.  It also always ends up in him being thrown out, but he needs the distraction and where better to find it than a bit of harmless mischief.

He also prints a bunch of stickers with Katie’s face on them and speech bubbles that say things like, “My big brother is way smarter and cooler than me!” and “I love Coran’s paladin lunch!” and he sticks them all over the green lion.

“Good kitty,” he says to it, patting the metal of its haunches as he scrambles all over it in Katie’s maintenance harness.  He’s not sure how much he really believes their whole paladin bond schtick, but he does get a vague sense of amused approval from the lion, and it rumbles a bit under his feet in a way that could conceivably be some kind of purr.

That very important task complete, he goes searching for the paladins, and finds them, surprisingly, relaxing together in one of the lounge rooms.  Even Keith is there, as are the Alteans, and Matt announces himself by interrupting their quiet conversations with a cheerful, “I just walked in, the party can start now.”  Lance grins at him and Matt grins back, and they bump fists when Matt flops onto the couch beside him, slinging his legs across Lance’s lap.

The lounges are huge, and their numbers are small.  Even with five paladins and two Alteans sprawled out every which way on the couches, there is still a good selection of available places for Matt to flop.  He’s used to the way everyone acts a little awkward when he enters a room, so he doesn’t register that Katie’s expression closes up when he chooses to lie down between Hunk and Lance.

Hunk pats his head absentmindedly, and Matt cranes his neck to blink up at him.  Hunk goes a little red, when he realizes what he’s doing, and he snatches his hand back, muttering apologies.

Matt shrugs, shoulder shifting against the soft material of the couch.  “I don’t mind,” he says, and Hunk tentatively touches his head again.  

“Your hair is really long,” he comments.  “D’you want me to cut it?”

Matt eyes Hunk’s head doubtfully.  “Do you cut your own hair?  ‘Cause, no offense, big guy, but I don’t think the floppy surfer would be a good look for me.”

Hunk laughs, but Katie says sharply, “Hunk cuts all of our hair.  He’s good at it.”

Matt blinks at her in surprise.  “Okay.  Calm down, Katie, geeze.”  She scowls at him and very pointedly goes back to her conversation with Keith, who looks a little flummoxed and keeps glancing obviously between her and Matt.  Matt watches her for a few minutes, then shrugs again and rolls his head back against Hunk’s thigh.

Hunk smiles awkwardly at him.  “Offer stands, if you want it,” he says.

“I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m good for now.  Gonna see if I can catch up to where Katie’s was before I left.  Since she’s got my old hairstyle now.  I’m pretty close, I think.”

Hunk’s smile changes to something more genuine and he laughs.  “Oh man,” Lance says, “I can’t picture Pidge with long hair.”

“Dude, she literally has a picture of it, remember?”  Addressing Matt, Hunk says, “That one from the Kerberos launch, you know?  I totally thought you were her -- when we thought she was a dude -- and that she was your, uh, her girlfriend.”

Matt laughs, the loud kind of laughter that echoes back to him off the walls and makes his back arch off of the couch.  “I told her!  She looks like me!  She’s like my own little mini-me!”  He laughs some more.

“I’m not,” Katie says stiffly, and when Matt looks over, still grinning, she glares.  

Matt wiggles his eyebrows at her.  “Are too.”

She growls at him and pouts.

“What’s got your goat?” he asks, affecting a casual tone.  He knows it’s a transparent effort when Lance pats his ankle, but Katie rises to it anyway.

“None of your business!”  Yeah, sure, fine, except that she was the one to start this, and now Matt is getting angry, too.

“Guys…” Shiro starts, but Katie and Matt both snap, “Shut up, Shiro!” at the same time.

“Katie,” Matt starts, unsure of what he’s supposed to say but feeling like he should be saying something.  Luckily, or unluckily, she cuts him off before he can get anyway.

“Just… don’t talk to me,” she says, standing up with stiff shoulders.  “I’m going to my lab.  Don’t follow me.”  And with that, she stalks out, leaving a heavy silence behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the late posting, hopefully the fact that it's a little longer than usual will make up for it.


	22. Chapter 22

“Um.”  Matt sits up, sliding his legs off of Lance’s lap.  Doesn’t really fit the mood anymore.  “Anyone know what that was about?”

There’s a chorus of muttered “no”s and some headshakes, though Hunk does look a little guilty.  Then again, Hunk tends to look guilty about a lot of things.  Matt narrows his eyes at him, but Hunk’s expression doesn’t get particularly _more_ guilty, so Matt decides that’s a dead end.  

“Someone should… probably go after her?” Hunk says, arching the statement up into a question.

Lance immediately yells, “Not it!” followed in short order by Keith.

Shiro puts on his fearless leader voice (Matt kind of hates that voice), and with all the diplomacy such a leader should have, he says, “Maybe we should give her some space.” 

“Coward.”  It just kind of slips out, but Matt doesn’t quite regret it.  

Shiro frowns at him.  Matt frowns back.  “Excuse me?”

Matt rolls his eyes.  “Don’t use the Commander Holt voice on me, you’re not my dad.  It doesn’t work.”  Matt’s confused, which makes him angry, and for some reason his body conflates that to fear.  The edges of his vision start blurring purple, and he yells, “Fuck!” and kicks one of the couches for good measure -- with his metal leg, so there’s a loud clang and the vibrations rattle uncomfortably in his stump -- and stalks out the door.  

When he’s out, he runs.  Nowhere in particular, but he’s not afraid of getting lost, anymore, not now that he knows how to use the equivalent of the ship’s internal GPS to find his way around.  So he just runs until he can’t breathe, because that’s easier to justify to himself than hyperventilating over a little argument with his little sister.  It doesn’t take long.  He crouches in a corner with his arms folded over his head until he can force his internal systems back into some semblance of a normal rhythm, and his erratic gasping echoes strangely in the empty space.  “Hydrogen,” he starts.  “Helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon…”

It takes a while, but eventually Matt is able to look around without seeing bugs or purple strobe lights, so that’s a small victory, there.  The fact that the bubbling anger has given way to embarrassment is more unfortunate -- anger is a much easier emotion.  Embarrassment is tricky, and messy, and he doesn’t like it.  He looks around and realizes that he’s in one of the hallways leading to the blue lion’s hangar.  

It’s on the way, at least.

The one thing Katie had said was not to follow her.  So of course that’s what he does.

“Hey,” he says as he walks into her lab, mentally bracing for… whatever she’s going to throw at him.  He doesn’t see her anywhere, but he knows she must be here, and as he wanders further in, the green lion’s particle barrier suddenly activates, catching him off-guard and making him lose his balance.  “Whoa!  Okay.  Guess you’re in there.” He tries to get a sense of the atmosphere, if the green lion is putting out… vibes, or something.  When he sorts through the thoughts and emotions in his cluttered head, he does find one that doesn’t feel like it comes from him.  Contrition, for the particle barrier, and concern.  He taps on the barrier and leans against it, tilting his head back to look up at the lion.  “You’re taking care of her, huh?  Good kitty.  Can she hear me?”  He waits briefly for an answer, then mumbles, “I don’t know what I was expecting,” when he doesn’t get any response.  He sighs and sits down, leaning back against the particle barrier.  It’s a funny feeling, because he can’t really _feel_ anything, but he’s definitely supported.  Overall an odd sensation, but not one he necessarily dislikes.  It conforms nicely to his body and it’s pretty comfortable to lean against, actually, as far as these things go.  And Matt is a master of uncomfortable things by this point.

“So,” he says conversationally, looking at one of the half-assembled robots on Katie’s workbench, rather than trying to look up at the lion and imagine Katie inside it.  “What crawled up your butt?”  He immediately winces.  “Sorry.  Jokes are probably bad, huh?”  He twitches the muscle fibers in his foot, making the gears click and whir inside his leg.  “Look.  I don’t know what I did.  Introspection is kinda outside my scope of brainpower at the moment.  So if you’re waiting for me to figure it out myself, you’re gonna be waiting a long time.”  He pauses, taps his foot, searches awkwardly for the right words to use.  “I… there’s a lot going on right now that I don’t understand.  And you know me, I hate that.  So this… this is at least something I should be able to fix, right?  This is something I should understand.  I mean, fuck, you’re my sister.  I’m supposed to look out for you and shit."  Katie's always be hardheaded, never really needed or wanted to be looked after.  Which is probably a good thing, given Kerberos and everything that happened... after.  Good that Katie can take care of herself.  Still.  It's the principle of it, probably inscribed in the programming of his soul, somewhere.  Must look out for younger sibling. 

"Not that you’ve ever made it easy.  Remember that time we went to that theme park?  One of the Disney ones…” he tries to filter the memory for the specific park, but he can’t find it anywhere.  Every time he thinks he has it, it slips through his fingers.  He flicks his head.  “Whatever.  You were, what, seven?  And mom and dad told me I had to look after you, so of course as soon as they went to do… something, you ran off.  I was so mad at you.  I was going to get in trouble, and all because you couldn’t just stay put and do what you were told…” he breaks off, the memory swimming behind his eyelids, and he presses the heels of his palms against his eyes.  “I didn’t know what to do. I was scared.”

He remembers searching through the crowd, yelling Katie’s name in his crackly, pre-pubescent voice, and the feeling redoubles within him.  “I don’t know what to do,” he admits.  “I don’t know what… what you want from me.”

He shakes his head again, to clear out the fuzzy emotions, and he draws his knees up to his chest, resting his cheek on the cool metal plating of his knee.  It hums under his ear.  He sits there like that until his body goes numb, and his brain follows in short order.  He has a lot of practice in numbness.  He checks out of reality, and drifts, and waits.

Floating along in the mental haze, he ebbs and flows with whatever half-memories his mind dregs up.  Nothing full, or concrete -- the feeling of the dog’s tongue on his fingers.  The scent of peanut butter cookies in the oven.  Lance’s blue eyes, bright and distinct in a wash of violet.  The earthy, damp smell of the mines and the rough growling of the machines.  Grinning at his dad over a drill and holding up a pilfered power converter, covered in oil and swimming with reckless adrenaline.  Being shackled and thrown into the cell.  Screaming in a purple void.

The wall he’s leaning against disappears suddenly, and Matt can’t react to it fast enough -- he falls backwards, flat on his back, and grunts in surprise.  His occs readjust themselves and he finds himself staring up at the underside of the green lion’s jaw.  The particle barrier is down.

“I wanted to go look at the alien automatons at the Space Explorer ride.”

Matt rolls his head to the side and sees Katie’s shoes, toes pointed towards him.  One toe scuffs at the floor, and then she sits down beside him, mirroring his earlier fetal posture.  Matt stays on the floor, sprawled out like he’s making snow angels, and he looks back up at the lion.

“I probably should have guessed that, huh?” he muses.  “Aliens and robots.  Of course.”  He wonders how she feels now that aliens and robots are the day-to-day fare of her life.  She probably loves it.  Right up her alley.

“You were really mad when you found me.”

“Yeah.”

“...I stomped on your foot.”

Matt laughs at that.  “Yeah, you did.  And look at it now.”  He lifts his leg up, the burnished plating reflecting in the light, and he wiggles his toes to make the light dance before letting it hit the floor again with a thunk.

“Don’t,” Katie says harshly.  “Just… don’t.”

Matt looks at her, but she’s still not looking at him.  “It doesn’t bother me,” he says, a bit baffled.

Katie sighs.  “I know.  It bothers me, though.  And Shiro.”

“Everything bothers Shiro,” Matt mutters, a bit unkindly.

“He feels guilty.”

“He shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, but he does.  And I don’t blame him.  He attacked you, right?  That’s why you… is that why your leg is... gone?”

“Oh.”  Matt thinks back and realizes that she’s right, and it surprises him.  Somewhere along the way, he’d separated the injury and his loss of Shiro -- Shiro’s sacrifice, as he’d thought, for so long -- into different events.  He knew that the cell where he’d been sick was different from the one at the mines, but he hadn’t remembered, hadn’t made the connection… but no, if he tries to put the memories in order, he remembers Shiro yelling and swinging the sword, and he remembers the few, awful seconds where he felt sure Shiro was going to kill him, and he remembers being thrown into a holding cell with five other aliens and nothing more than a stained cloth bandage to treat the injury.  And he remembers watching it grow dangerously infected, and the hysterical realization that he was going to die from it.  He swallows reflexively, and his hand unconsciously reaches to cup the knee that’s no longer there, falling short and landing on his thigh when he realizes what he’s doing.  He swallows again.  “Yeah.  Yeah, you’re right.  I… I didn’t remember that.  Shit.  Still.  Not his fault.”

“You know Shiro,” Katie says, and Matt wonders if he really does, anymore.

They sit in silence for a moment, Matt reeling over the implications of his realization, and he starts humming to take his mind off of it all, trying to distract himself.

“Seriously?”  Katie interrupts.  “Fullmetal Alchemist?”

Matt blinks.  “What?”

“That song.  The depressing one from that old-ass anime you were obsessed with while you were TAing that bioengineering class.”

There’s a moment where Matt tries to remember what he’d been humming, and to connect it to the name… and then he grins.  “Well, it’s appropriate, between me and Shiro we have the same metal limbs as Edward Elric.  We just need to stick you in a giant suit of armour… guess the green lion works, actually.  I’m calling it Al from now on, it’s official.  That’s its name now.  We should paint it on the side like on a sailboat or whatever.  Wish I could do alchemy though, it’s cool.”

“It’s not real, Matt.”

“That’s what they thought about aliens, too, until… actually, do you think the people back on Earth even know that aliens exist?  Like, if they thought that we all just vanished into the ether or whatever.  Hey, does that mean we made first contact?”  He grimaces.  “Of course the Galra had to ruin that, too.”

Katie curls up further and asks, in a small voice, “Was it really that bad?”

Matt laughs out loud, because how else could he possibly react to that?  He laughs until his stomach hurts and he finally says, with a dark honesty that prickles, “Whatever you’re thinking, it was worse.”

The first sniffle has Matt shooting upright in alarm.  “Hey, what, no, don’t do that, it’s fine!  It’s -- well, it’s not fine, but it’s better.  C’mon, Katie, I can’t deal with this, it’s weird,” he pleads.

“This isn’t what was supposed to happen,” she sniffs, pushing up her glasses to wipe at her eyes.  Matt hovers, hands half-raised, something sour swimming in his gut.  “I was gonna leave Voltron,” she says, and Matt blinks and frowns because that’s news to him.  “I’ve been looking for you and dad for _years_ and right at the beginning, I was going to leave Voltron to find you, but I changed my mind.  I thought staying was the right choice.”

And Matt feels like he should reassure her, but he can’t.  He’s frozen with the thought that Katie could have come for them, a year ago, when he and their dad were still together and they were okay, kind of, more okay than Matt is now, and they could have gotten out, together, _a year ago_ … he has to swallow hard to keep from throwing up and he pulls his hands back to sit on them to keep Katie from seeing how badly they are shaking.

“I was wrong, wasn’t I?”  Katie says, pleading, and Matt can’t answer her.  “I should’ve left.  Matt?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers, and it’s the best he can do.  

“And I didn’t even --” Katie’s voice breaks, and Matt chokes back a sympathetic whine.  “I didn’t even find you.  I didn’t d-do anything, I didn’t even _know,_ it was just _Lance_...”

Matt thinks about losing Katie in an amusement park, and feeling scared and useless and angry with himself.  For a second he thinks about what it’d feel like if he’d never found her, and he shudders.  He can’t fix this.  It’s not a machine, not a leg, not a bad grade on a test.  He can’t fix it.  

He reaches out and he can’t tell who’s shaking more, himself or Katie, and he feels her heartbeat hammering against his chest and her shirt is damp with sweat (typical Holt stress-sweating, he thinks, wondering where that reaction’s gone in him and thinking he must have lost it with his leg).  She clings to his shirt, breathing in shuddering gulps, fingers clenching and unclenching reflexively as she fights with herself.  Matt can relate to that, and he thinks about trying to help, but his best coping strategies are certifiably insane; babbling nonsense and self-harming really aren’t good for anyone.  And Katie’s tough, always has been, and at least she hasn’t gone off the deep end -- yet, anyway -- and she still has all of her faculties in order.  So Matt just waits, smelling her clean hair and running his fingers up and down the ridges of her spine, counting them over and over until she quiets a little, shifting against him, and sniffs, “You’re so bony.”

Matt cracks a laugh and disengages from the hug, though he keeps one hand on Katie’s back, unsure of whether it’s for her comfort or his own, but he decides that it doesn’t really matter.  She wipes at her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and sniffs hard.  

“Sorry,” she says, flushed and embarrassed.  Matt shrugs.  

“About time that somebody else had an emotional breakdown,” he says flippantly.  “I was starting to think I was the only crazy one onboard this castle-slash-space ship filled with giant, alien robot lions.”  Katie elbows him in the stomach and he grunts and flicks her ear in retaliation.

“You’re not,” Katie starts, but she trails off awkwardly and Matt laughs, a single, bitter note.

“Yeah.  No getting around that one.  I’m nuts.  Totally cuckoo for cocoa puffs.  What does Lance say?  Apples and bananas.  You can tell that kid’s got like fifty million little siblings, he swears like a grandma.”

“It’s been better, though,” Katie says stubbornly.  

Matt scruffs at his hair, knocking his occs askew and watching the hangar jump as they bob back into place.  “A little, I guess, but.  Just ‘cause you don’t see as much of it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

“Lance sees it though, huh?” she says bitterly.

Matt raises his eyebrows.  “You _are_ jealous.  Not of me, though, huh.  Unexpected.”  Katie pouts and looks pointedly away from him.  Matt leans back on his elbows, thinking about this new development.  “Look,” he says finally.  “You were a little kid when me and dad left.”  

“I was thirteen.”

“Yeah.  A kid.”  She frowns but doesn’t say anything else, and Matt gets the impression that she’s waiting for him to keep talking, her shoulders stiff and intent.  “You’ve grown up a lot, obviously.  But you’re still my little sister.  It’s supposed to be my job to… protect you, and shit.”

“I don’t need to be protected,” she interrupts, ruffled, and Matt waves a hand.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a badass.  Defender of the universe.  Pretty sure you’re the last person who needs protecting.  Especially from me.”  It’s a little awkward to say out loud, but he needs to do it. 

Katie’s pleased reaction makes him feel a little less pathetic about it, but not that much.  She glances at him sidelong and quirks an eyebrow.  “Please make a point of telling Shiro that sometime,” she says dryly.

Matt grins back at her.  “Big brother instinct,” he declares, and Katie scoffs, some of the tension falling out of her shoulders.  Matt scratches at his palm until he realizes what he’s doing and tucks the hand under his leg to make himself stop.  “I… I know that you don’t need me to look out for you or anything, okay?  But this is the one thing… the one thing.  You don’t need to see me being pathetic.  Nobody does.”  He twitches and taps his fingernails against his metal leg, listening to the ringing chime.  “Lance is…” he pauses, trying to put it into words.  “He’s already seen it,” he decides.  “He’s already seen me at the, the low points.  What the Galra did with us… no room for secrets anymore, after that.  So.  We can, uh, talk about it.  Emote.  Without it being weird.”

Katie shuffles over and leans her head against his shoulder.  “You could talk to me,” she offers.

“I could,” he agrees, and he knows that they both know he won’t do it.

“So, when you, um, sleep with him…?”

Matt laughs.  “We’re not fucking.  Seriously.  It’s just, we have a lot of the same nightmares.  And being alone sort of freaks me out.  It helps.”

Katie looks up at him, lips pursed contemplatively.  “You don’t have to be alone,” she says, unknowingly echoing Lance.  

Matt nods placatingly.  “Sure, sure.  You can’t say you don’t get annoyed having me around, though.”

“That’s because you’re annoying,” she answers, very matter-of-fact, and Matt laughs again.

“Makes me and Lance a good pair, then, huh?”  She grins at that, conceding the point, and Matt ruffles her hair.

“Anything else you wanted to talk about?” he asks.  “Or did we cover it?  ‘Cause I don’t know how much more of a beating my poor emotions can take today.  I feel like dad. He cried when we launched, you know, even though he’s been in space like eight times and knew we were -- er, supposed to come back.”  It’s the first time that Matt’s been able to think of their dad without wanting to throw up.

There’s a suspicious silence from Katie, until Matt nudges her pointedly.  “Is he okay?” she finally asks, sounding like the little kid they’d left behind.  “Can we find him?”

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.  “I hope so.”

“What happened?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it and shakes his head, jaw clenched against the rising irrational panic.  “I can’t, Katie, not yet.”  She makes a quiet noise of distress, cutting it off as soon as it starts, but Matt still hears it, and his stomach flips.  “I… he was okay when we were separated.  Better than me.  But… I don’t know.  I was, too.  And l-look how far I’ve come since then,” he jokes, because black humour is a great coping mechanism and he definitely doesn’t hate himself for it.  Right.  

Katie takes a deep breath, then sets her jaw and nods.  “We’re going to find him,” she declares, steel in her voice, and she sounds so confident that Matt almost believes it. He squeezes her shoulder and she pats his hand.

“Well,” Matt says, clearing his throat.  “You probably have to get back to training or something.  You should, uh, do that.”

“Or,” Katie says, clamping down on his wrist.  Matt jolts and tries not to panic, and she quickly slides her hand down, tucking her fingers in between his and squeezing in reassurance.  “You could just sit here and let me snuggle you.  Platonic snuggling is good for you, remember?” she adds smugly, and Matt groans.

“Turning my own words against me!” he laments, throwing his arms up in the air.  “Betrayal!  Deception!  Disgrace!”  But he holds them up until Katie scoots closer to him, and lets them settle around her shoulders.  

She leans against his shoulder, then purses her lips, glances up, and says, “Don’t freak out,” which is definitely not enough warning to keep Matt from freaking out a little when the green lion suddenly… _activates_ , and moves one giant paw towards them, the claws skimming the hangar floor.  Matt has one loud, horrible thought that it’s going to crush them and that’s it, but then it sets its paw down right beside them -- gently, which, in giant space lion terms, means that the floor only shakes a little bit -- and Katie tugs at him until they’re both propped up comfortably against its paw.

“Hunk,” Katie says, and Matt squints in confusion until he realizes she’s talking to the computer on her wrist.  “I’m busy.  Leave me alone.  And tell Shiro and Allura that I’m a badass and don’t need to train this afternoon.”  She taps the screen and the wristlet goes dark.

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Matt points out, but he grins and ruffles her hair.  “He’s gonna make you do laps or something.”

“Oh, definitely,” she agrees.  “So many laps.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks, just a note that the final chapter is going to be late, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday rather than the regular Friday. Sorry for the wait!


	23. Chapter 23

“Hey there, Captain Hook,” Matt calls, bouncing into the training room on his pogo peg leg.

Shiro finishes his push-ups -- Matt has no idea how many he’s aiming for, so he says a random number for every one, just to be a shit.  The first thing Shiro does, when he reaches his end point, is wipe his sweaty face on a towel.  The second thing is to whap Matt across the chest with said towel.

“Captain Hook, really?”

Matt shrugs.  “Going with the pirate theme,” he says, balancing on his natural foot and brandishing his leg.  He’d spent the previous afternoon distressing and painting it to look like old, gnarled wood, and he’s tied a scrap of red cloth around the stump like a bandanna.  It’s great.  His childhood dreams coming true.  “Arr,” he adds for effect, smirking at Shiro’s unimpressed expression.

“I can’t believe you actually use that,” Shiro mutters, and Matt shrugs.

“It’s fun,” he answers simply.

A complicated expression passes over Shiro’s face, and he starts to pull on his long-sleeved undershirt.  Matt bursts out, “No, wait,” and Shiro pauses, looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing,” Shiro says dryly.

Matt flaps a hand at him.  “Yes you did, and no, that’s not the point.  I just --” he gestures impatiently, and skips the few steps between them to grab at Shiro’s metal forearm.  Shiro flinches hard and Matt feel a little guilty about that, but he doesn’t let his grip loosen and after a moment Shiro stops actively trying to tug away from him.  Matt considers that a success.

“You don’t think I should have fun with my leg,” he accuses, not looking at Shiro’s face.  “You think I should hate it.  Because you hate yours.  True or false?”

Shiro is quiet for a long moment, and then he sighs.  “Something like that.”

Matt hums.  “That’s stupid,” he declares, ignoring the way Shiro stiffens.  “Don’t project on me.  I don’t hate it.  I mean, yeah, okay, it sucks that it was necessary at all but since I’ve got the damn thing I might as well have fun with it, right?  And besides, it’s interesting.  I used to dabble in prosthetics before Kerberos, you know.”

Shiro’s arm vibrates slightly in Matt’s hand, and Matt feels its weight shift when Shiro barks a sarcastic laugh.  “Dabble.  Right.  I’m pretty sure most people would call that a career, Matt.”

Matt waves that away, too.  “Yeah, well, whatever.  Look.  Uh.  I know you’re not cool with your arm, so here.  I made you a thing.”

It had taken a lot longer than Matt expected, to synthesize a passable artificial skin, and even then, he’d had to figure out how to match the colour and use the scans Katie has of Shiro’s arm to shape it into what more or less resembles a droopy, flesh-coloured opera glove.  But he did it.  And now he’s excited to see if it works.  And for Shiro’s reaction, of course.  But even before he’d finished it, Matt had decided how he was going to present the cover to Shiro -- and now it’s finally time.  He’s practically bubbling over with repressed glee as he pulls the rolled up glove out of his pocket.

He uses it to slap Shiro across the cheek and bursts into guffaws.

Shiro jumps back, startled and incredulous, and yelps Matt’s name in a way that makes Matt laugh even harder.  “What the hell was that?” he asks, eyes wide, and Matt clutches at his chest..

“You shoulda seen your face, beefcake, oh _man_ that was good.”

“I’m going to throw you out an airlock.”

“Nah.  Katie would be mad.  She’d tase you.  Take out your kneecaps.”

“Matt,” Shiro says in his Leader Voice.  Matt’s still grinning, but he straightens up and presents the skin casing.  Shiro takes it gingerly, and looks it over without visible comprehension.  “Thanks?”

Matt bounces up onto the ball of his foot.  “It’s for your arm.  Like a glove.  C’mon, put it on, I worked really hard, you stoic dingbat.”

Shiro looks winded as he inspects the glove again.  “It’s…”

“Put it _on!_ ” Matt demands, impatient, and finally, Shiro does.  It fits perfectly, sliding on without so much as catching on the Galra prosthetic, and even the shape is right, padded out in some areas and thinned in others to mimic the shape of a real arm.  Shiro runs his natural fingers up the arm and Matt benevolently ignores the faint sheen in his eyes.

“This is --” Shiro starts, and then he pauses to clear his throat.  “Wow.  Thanks, Matt.  I don’t know what to say.”

“You could start with something like, ‘Ooh Matt you’re the smartest, coolest, sexiest person ever, how can I ever repay you.’”  Matt pauses, and thinks about that for a moment.  “Or, you know, you could, uh, not do that.”

Shiro smiles, flexing his fingers and twisting the arm to watch how the artificial skin moves.  There’s still something not-quite-realistic about it, but dammit, it’s close.  Matt’s pretty pleased with the outcome, at least for this first model.  He reaches out to feel the way the skin stretches over Shiro’s metal knuckles, nodding to himself.

“It won’t hold up under combat or like, if you activate your arm to heat up a Pop-Tart or whatever, and I know it’s not a real arm or anything, but… yeah.  Thought you’d like it.”  

Shiro nods.  “I do,” he says simply, and then wraps his arm around Matt’s shoulders and squeezes.

Matt leans into him, awkwardly looping an arm around Shiro’s waist to return the hug.  “Aw, yeah, no prob, big guy.  Gotcha covered.  Literally.  Hah hah.”  Matt pulls away first, when the prolonged contact starts to make him feel stifled and edgy, and he slaps his hands on his thighs.  “Hey, uh,” he starts, “Me’n the other nerds had a contest to see who could make the best replacement leg for me.  We’re gonna go test them now.  Wanna come?”

*

To nobody’s surprise, the legs that Katie and Hunk designed are both unique and relatively functional, though they’re not without issues.  Matt has a few moments of wild laughter when the exaggerated nerve impulses he’s gotten used to using on the Galra prosthetic cause Katie’s leg to start spitting laser bullets in every direction, and Hunk’s leg is just a little bit too heavy and it pulls uncomfortably on his stump.  “Just a few bugs, though,” he says, pleased, and even the techie paladins aren’t too put off by the malfunctions.  Katie practically pulls hers off of Matt herself, already muttering under her breath about calibrations and improvements.  Hunk is apologetic, but he too is far more focused on the leg than he is on Matt, and whatever mental energy he has to spare is going towards half-listening to Lance as the latter flits around like an overeager butterfly, poking at the appendages and asking rapid-fire questions without waiting for answers.  In the corner, Keith’s watching beside Shiro, who has his arms crossed in what Matt’s pretty sure is supposed to be a deterrent to their goofing off too much, but he’s trying so hard to stifle an amused expression that the effort fails completely.

Matt clears his throat to get everyone’s attention, and spreads his arms in a grand gesture.  “Alright, alright, stand aside, baby nerdlings, and behold the master’s work.”

The prosthetic is wrapped up in a scrap of metallic cloth, and Matt draws it out from the back of the workbench with a flourish.  Katie and Hunk lean forward eagerly -- Matt has steadfastly refused to let them see anything beyond the first bare skeleton structure, and while he'd usually assume that Katie was going to peek, he’d threatened to re-name all the files on her computer with Disney lyrics and move them all to different folders.  He knows Katie’s preferred system of organized chaos and exactly the best way to ruin it.  It’s a very good threat.

“You ready for this?” he asks, and Katie rolls her eyes.  He grins at her, and whisks the covering away.  His newly-constructed leg sits gleaming in the bright lab lights.

Hunk is the first to react.  He gasps in delight, eyes wide and hands clasped.  “It’s _me!_ ”

Katie and Lance laugh out loud, and Matt hears Shiro’s amused huff from his corner.

“It doesn’t have any of the nifty special features like you guys’ve got,” Matt says, lifting the leg from the table and lining it up with the nerve ports.  It connects smoothly, of course, and he stands up and strikes a pose.  “But I thought it was unfair that I’m the only human on this ship who doesn’t get to be Voltron.  Figured I’d fix that.”

There are all sorts of video logs and data scans for Voltron onboard the castle ship.  Matt had gone through them in close detail, studying the parts of the whole. Attached to the stump of his amputated leg is an aesthetically perfect, scaled-down replica of the yellow lion as the left leg of Voltron.

“That’s amazing,” Lance enthuses.  Hunk is still near-wordless, with an ear-to-ear grin.

“Yeah, I know,” Matt says. “I should make an entire exosuit,” he adds, half-joking.  “Mini Voltron.”

Lance laughs again.  “Holy quiznak, _yes_ , you have to do that,” he says, to loud agreement from Katie.  Matt grins and ruffles her hair.  She doesn’t bother to duck out of the way.

*

“Hey, Katie,” Matt says, a few minutes of technobabble and meta jokes later.  “Got something else I wanna show you.”  He jerks his head towards the workstation that he’s set up in a corner of Katie’s hangar.  Katie hops off of her stool and follows on his heel, and Matt sees Shiro shepherding the others out of the corner of his eye.  Hunk laughs at something Shiro says, and it’s the kind of happy sound that Matt’s starting to get used to again.

Katie hops up onto the desk and Matt promptly shoves her back off again.  She bats his arm away and leans back on her elbows instead.  “What’s up?”

“Made something for you,” he says, pulling up a file.  “It’s not quite done yet, but, uh.  I was fiddling with your BLIP stuff, added a scan for specific genetic markers and stuff.  I think this might…” he trails off, swallowing around the nervous butterflies in his throat.

Katie squints at the lines of code.  “You used the spires to up the range, right?  I mean, we’ve done that before, I don’t… _oh._ ”

Matt twitches and rubs at his hand.  “Yeah.  Yeah, uh, I’m calling it a Descendant/Ancestor DNA finder, ‘cause...”

“DAD finder,” Katie whispers.

Matt swallows again and nods.  “We’re gonna… we have to find him,” he manages.  “We have to.”  Katie leans into his side, eyes bright behind her glasses.

He hears his sister’s breathing and the quiet ambient whirring of the ship, he feels her heartbeat against his.  The hangar is just a little bit too cold, but he has a loose, cozy sweater, and the scars around his wrists don’t hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are. Thank you for reading (I can't believe anyone has stuck with me this long, dang). I'm hoping to write more within this universe, but for now, this is complete. We'll see where the future (and season 4!) takes us.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm around on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/@paxlegomenon) if anyone ever wants to chat! Thanks for reading.


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